Mercury Pictures Presents (Barnes & Noble Book Club Edition)

by Anthony Marra

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

With his much-lauded debut A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, Anthony Marra stormed the literary scene and best of lists. Marra has penned yet another winner with this epic story of family secrets, love and war, loyalty and reinvention that expertly cuts between 1930s Hollywood and a war-torn Mussolini’s Italy. Immensely quotable dialogue zips along from the mouths of immediately unforgettable and colorful characters: Maria Lagana, Artie Feldman, and Eddie Lu to name a few. A gimlet-eyed tale of exile and finding home in rather unexpected places, and certainly one not to be missed.

This Barnes & Noble Book Club Edition includes an essay from the author reflecting on the origins and the journey of writing Mercury Pictures Presents as well as a reader discussion guide.

The epic tale of a brilliant woman who must reinvent herself to survive, moving from Mussolini’s Italy to 1940s Los Angeles—a timeless story of love, deceit, and sacrifice from the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

"A genuinely moving and life-affirming novel that’s a true joy to read.”—Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere

ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2022—BookPage

Like many before her, Maria Lagana has come to Hollywood to outrun her past. Born in Rome, where every Sunday her father took her to the cinema instead of church, Maria immigrates with her mother to Los Angeles after a childhood transgression leads to her father’s arrest.

Fifteen years later, on the eve of America’s entry into World War II, Maria is an associate producer at Mercury Pictures, trying to keep her personal and professional lives from falling apart. Her mother won’t speak to her. Her boss, a man of many toupees, has been summoned to Washington by congressional investigators. Her boyfriend, a virtuoso Chinese American actor, can’t escape the studio’s narrow typecasting. And the studio itself, Maria’s only home in exile, teeters on the verge of bankruptcy.

Over the coming months, as the bright lights go dark across Los Angeles, Mercury Pictures becomes a nexus of European émigrés: modernist poets trying their luck as B-movie screenwriters, once-celebrated architects becoming scale-model miniaturists, and refugee actors finding work playing the very villains they fled. While the world descends into war, Maria rises through a maze of conflicting politics, divided loyalties, and jockeying ambitions. But when the arrival of a stranger from her father’s past threatens Maria’s carefully constructed facade, she must finally confront her father’s fate—and her own.

Written with intelligence, wit, and an exhilarating sense of possibility, Mercury Pictures Presents spans many moods and tones, from the heartbreaking to the ecstatic. It is a love letter to life’s bit players, a panorama of an era that casts a long shadow over our own, and a tour de force by a novelist whose work The Washington Post calls “a flash in the heavens that makes you look up and believe in miracles.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593595923
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/02/2022
Edition description:	Barnes & Noble Book Club Edition
Pages:	432
Sales rank:	8,486
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

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.

Editorial Reviews

04/11/2022

Marra’s meticulously crafted latest (after the collection The Tsar of Love and Techno) follows a host of outsiders as they try to make it through pre-WWII Italy and wartime Los Angeles with some of their morals intact. Teenage Maria Lagana and her mother leave Italy for Los Angeles after Fascists exile her father. By 1941, Maria is B-movie producer Artie Feldman’s second-in-command. Artie, a toupee-wearing loudmouth with a heart of gold (he’ll hire any down on their luck European exile), is at war with the censors, his twin brother/business partner, and the bankers with a stake in Mercury Pictures. Marra skillfully switches between small-town Sicily and a still-small Los Angeles where, post–Pearl Harbor, Maria must register as an internal enemy and her Chinese American boyfriend, Eddie, has to flee assailants who are convinced he’s a Japanese spy. The plot is intricate: Artie tries to release a political movie and fend off creditors, Maria and Eddie plot to make a film, a Berlin-born model-builder recreates her city, a Sicilian photographer flees Italy. While Marra’s pleasure in the details and argot of the past occasionally feels like overkill, this tough-minded, funny outing exemplifies what Maria calls the democratic promise of “the miniaturist’s gaze,” in which “all were worthy.” Thanks to Marra, the pleasure is contagious. (July)

Publishers Weekly

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 novel 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 sneaky 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 Anthony Marra has wrung from the English language.”—Sara Nović, author of Girl at War and True Biz

“Crackling with wit and suffused with insight, Anthony Marra’s new novel is as epic in sweep as a movie set yet it 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 forward toward the future. A genuinely moving and life-affirming novel that’s a true joy to read.”—Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere

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

From the Publisher

02/01/2022

Leaving 1920s Italy for Los Angeles after inadvertently causing her father's arrest, movie-besotted Maria eventually becomes an associate producer at Mercury Pictures. As World War II dawns, Maria is struggling with her personal life even as the studio struggles fi nancially, but soon it's flooded with refugee European artists—modernist poets writing racy movie scripts. Then a stranger who knew her father arrives to remind her of his fate. From the award-winning, New York Times best-selling author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena.

Library Journal