Anthony Marra books

Anthologies

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Inheritance Collection Reading Order

Short Stories/Novellas

Standalone Novels

Anthony Marra studied at the University of Southern California, then earned his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and held a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. His first published story, The Wolves of Bilaya Forest, won a Pushcart Prize and the Narrative Prize in 2010, and it signaled the kind of writer he would become: someone drawn to ordinary people caught up in extraordinary historical circumstances.

His debut novel, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (2013), is set in a small Chechen village during the Second Chechen War. It follows a doctor, a displaced child, and their neighbors as they try to survive amid violence and occupation. The book was longlisted for the National Book Award and won the John Leonard Prize from the National Book Critics Circle. His story collection, The Tsar of Love and Techno (2015), links tales spanning decades of Soviet and post-Soviet history. Mercury Pictures Presents (2022), his second novel, shifts to 1940s Hollywood, where an Italian emigre works at a B-movie studio while the world burns around her. Marra writes about war, displacement, and the ways people hold onto identity when everything else is stripped away, and he does it with humor and specificity rather than sentiment.