"Crackling with wit and suffused with insight, Anthony Marra's new novel is as epic in sweep as a movie set yet delineates the inner workings of the human heart with a miniaturist's precision. Mercury Pictures Presents explores the endless give-and-take between life and art, the cost of integrity, and the ways we must make peace with the past in order to move toward the future." --Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere

"Marra has been compared to Nabokov, Kafka, and Orwell. The word 'brilliant' gets used in all his reviews. Mercury Pictures Presents runs from Mussolini's Italy to 1940s Hollywood, and is full of history, comedy, and horror. It's a great literary." --Ann Patchett, author of The Dutch House

"[Anthony] Marra has ascended to the top of the literary ranks." --Booklist (starred review)

" Mercury Pictures Presents is a wonder--intimate and sweeping, heartfelt and satirical, one of the funniest and most moving novels I've read in a long time. A story of fascism, war, and refugees finding freedom through art and storytelling, it's both a joy to read and highly relevant to our times." --Jess Walter, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins and The Angel of Rome

"Smart, heartfelt, and sneakily funny, Mercury Pictures Presents has all the breadth and power of an epic and the attention to detail of an intimate conversation. I read it in a state of admiration for the beauty Marra has wrung from the English language." --Sara Novic, author of Girl at War and True Biz

"A novel so rich and wondrous, written with such grace and wit, that there's only one word for Anthony Marra: genius." --Sally Mann, author of Hold Still, finalist for the National Book Award

"Anthony Marra is a writer of boundless talent: He is a top-notch historian, a razor-sharp social critic, a deeply sensitive psychologist, and an exuberant satirist--all at the same time. . . . A singularly pleasurable read--smart, sad, hilarious, and always full of heart." --Nathan Hill, bestselling author of The Nix

"Achingly beautiful . . . You laugh, then you sigh, then you weep. . . . Extraordinary." --Luis Urrea, bestselling author of The Devil's Highway and The Hummingbird's Daughter

"Marra brings his considerable gifts for scope and scene to early Hollywood, animating, as he does so thrillingly, the city, the players, the war, and the repercussions of small and huge actions on families, fates, countries, and film. And: this fully-realized world is also really funny! I laughed aloud many times, even as I marveled." --Aimee Bender, author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

Brief Description:

"When we first meet Maria Lagana, she's rewriting scripts at Mercury Pictures, a failing Hollywood studio known for its schlock. Maria's job is to re-craft dialogue and action to circumvent the censors, a skill she's mysteriously adept at. Born in Italy, as a teenager Maria witnessed Mussolini's censors arrest her father, an event that will destroy her family and burden Maria with questions of guilt and responsibility she will carry with her throughout this wondrous, far-reaching novel. Like many before her, Maria has come to Hollywood to outrun her past. Despite its cheap production values and factory-approach to making movies, Mercury Pictures is a nexus of refugees and emigres, each struggling to reinvent themselves in the land of celluloid. There's Artie, the studio boss, a man of many toupees who barely escaped the pogroms of Eastern Europe; there's Anna, a set designer, who ran afoul of Hitler; and there's Eddie Lu, a struggling actor and Maria's boyfriend, who despite being born in Los Angeles encounters the worst of America's xenophobia. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, everything changes for Maria and her world, forcing her come to terms with her father's fate--and her own"--

Biographical Note:

Anthony Marra is the New York Times bestselling author of The Tsar of Love and Techno and A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, winner of the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and longlisted for the National Book Award.