It's a story passed like a baton from one teller to another a hundred-year relay made up of dreams crushed and lives cut short, of self-destructiveness passed from one generation to the next to the next.įirst Reads Exclusive First Read: Anthony Marra's 'The Tsar Of Love And Techno'ĭid I love the extended run of 'I slept with your mom' jokes in 'A Prisoner Of The Caucasus'? I did. From the artist-turned-censor who paints the face of his dead brother over the faces of a thousand disgraced bureaucrats, to the ballet dancer accused of conspiring with traitors, to that ballerina's granddaughter who, briefly, becomes the most famous person ever to come out of the nickel mining towns of the Siberian arctic, to one of her ex-boyfriends captured by Chechen rebels during the war, and on and on and on. It's Anthony Marra's new book - new novel, really, because it is one story, told in the form of a dozen stories. The bizarre, heartbreaking, bitterly funny history of the Soviet Union, pre- and post-Glasnost, pre- and post-Communism, pre- and post-realism, told through a series of tightly interconnected short stories called The Tsar Of Love And Techno. It ends with a solitary Russian in a space capsule, year unknown, listening to an ancient cassette tape as he passes out beyond the orbit of Pluto.Īnd in between there is. It begins with a solitary Russian underground in Leningrad in 1937, in a train tunnel not yet completed - an artist censoring photographs for the state, removing the images of traitors from the official history of a place already expert at removing people. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. In stunning prose, with rich character portraits and a sense of history reverberating into the present, The Tsar of Love and Techno is a captivating work from one of our greatest new talents.Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Tsar of Love and Techno Subtitle Stories Author Anthony Marra And great sacrifices are made in the name of an oil landscape unremarkable except for the almost incomprehensibly peaceful past it depicts. Young men across the former USSR face violence at home and in the military. Two pairs of brothers share a fierce, protective love.

A chorus of women recount their stories and those of their grandmothers, former gulag prisoners who settled their Siberian mining town.

A 1930s Soviet censor painstakingly corrects offending photographs, deep underneath Leningrad, bewitched by the image of a disgraced prima ballerina. This stunning, exquisitely written collection introduces a cast of remarkable characters whose lives intersect in ways both life-affirming and heartbreaking. From the New York Times bestselling author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena-dazzling, poignant, and lyrical interwoven stories about family, sacrifice, the legacy of war, and the redemptive power of art.

The tsar of love and techno characters