Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Tsar of Love and Techno | 2015 | Anthony Marra | Buy |
The Tsar of Love and Techno (2015) is Anthony Marra’s collection of linked stories, and calling it just a story collection sells it short. The pieces are arranged into Side A, an Intermission, and Side B, like an old cassette tape, and they span from the 1930s to the early 2000s across Russia and the former Soviet republics. A 1930s censor in Leningrad obsessively retouches photographs, erasing enemies of the state while fixating on a disgraced ballerina. Women in a Siberian mining town tell the stories of their grandmothers, former gulag prisoners. Young men face violence in the military and at home.
What holds the collection together is Marra’s trick of threading small objects, images, and characters through stories set decades apart, so that a painting altered in one story reappears in another, and the consequences of one character’s choices ripple forward through generations. The book was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the American Academy of Arts and Letters Literary Award. It is funny, bleak, and surprisingly tender, and it confirmed that Marra’s debut novel was no fluke.