The Tsar of Love and Techno: Stories — Anthony Marra

A DAZZLING COLLECTION OF INTERLINKED STORIES.

Beginning in the tunnels beneath Leningrad and ending at the edge of the solar system, The Tsar of Love and Techno stretches across a century, a continent, and a striking cast of characters tied together by an obscure nineteenth-century Russian painting.

In the 1930s, a failed portrait artist is tasked by Soviet censors to erase political dissidents from official images and artworks -- beginning with his disgraced brother. When an antique painting of a dacha set in a pastoral landscape crosses his desk, he subversively begins to draw his brother into every picture he censors. The decision echoes down the decades, threading together the stories of a legendary ballerina and her granddaughter, a blind restoration artist, a retired gangster, a widower who last saw his wife in that very dacha, and a soldier imprisoned in its well with a mixtape that may hold a final message from his family.

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena was lauded by critics as the work of one of the most original and important writers of his generation. Among many honors, it won the inaugural John Leonard Prize from the National Book Critics Circle and the Barnes and Noble Discover Award, and was the first ever English-language novel to receive Greece's Athens Prize for Literature. It has been published in nineteen countries.

Alternately tragic and comic, and richly profound throughout., The Tsar of Love and Techno is a masterly tour de force.