Maria could. Inevitably, the most creative aspect of any Mercury production was the publicity campaign promoting it. Well that was freaking stupendous. I laughed, I cried, I marveled at the illustration of man's inhumanity to man. No really, no shade, all those things happened as I read this gorgeous book. And speaking of gorgeous, the prose! Brilliant line after brilliant line. Nino’s mother taught him how to light a photograph according to its purpose, its audience, and its subject. ‘We will make him fall in love,’ she assured an anxious young seamstress who came to have her portrait taken for a prospective suitor. The suitor, a stonemason in Ohio whom the seamstress would be buried next to seventy-three years later, saw the love of his life for the first time through the eyes of Nino’s mother.” PDF / EPUB File Name: Mercury_Pictures_Presents_-_Anthony_Marra.pdf, Mercury_Pictures_Presents_-_Anthony_Marra.epub He soon has cause to question that vision as internment camps spring up across U.S. deserts, and as the Marias of America must begin registering as “enemy aliens” and be sentenced to their own confino, a five-mile radius encircling their homes.

Mercury Pictures Presents ‹ Literary Hub Mercury Pictures Presents ‹ Literary Hub

So much relevance. This is a story of how war impacts the lives of people caught in the time and place. I can’t say that I loved it as much as A Constellation of Vital Phenomena or Marra’s story collection, The Tsar of Love and Techno. However, this is certainly worth reading. It would make a terrific movie. As an adult Maria works for a film studio where she meets many European refugees trying to sell their skills to make a living while suffering discrimination and often under suspicion as ‘enemy aliens’.Epically entertaining . . . You’ll laugh, you’ll cry in the marvelous Mercury Pictures Presents.” — San Francisco Chronicle Marra sneaks into his fiction usually unlikely and unexpected humor. In Mercury Pictures Presents, it’s the pure borscht belt repartee between Artie Feldman, the co-founder and director of production of Mercury Pictures, and Maria Lagana, his underpaid and exploited Girl Friday: ”’How’m I looking?’ [Artie asks Maria] The truth was that Artie exceeded his protégé’s talent for euphemism. ‘You don’t look a day over twenty-five,’ she said. This elicited a rare grin from Artie. As a master bullshitter, he encouraged his apprentice’s efforts. Despite her sex and ethnicity, he knew Maria was, at heart, a Feldman Brother through and through. ‘I pay them to lie,’ Artie said, nodding in the direction of the accounting department. ‘I pay you to be honest.’ ‘Then you should pay me more.’”. Discussing Artie’s forthcoming testimony before a nativist congressional investigating committee, Maria volunteers: ”’Listen, how about I come with you to Washington?,’ she suggested. ‘We’ll prepare your opening statement on the flight in.’ ‘You really want to watch me get fed to the lions?’ ‘I’m from Rome. My people invented the sport’” This is an epic tale that begins in pre-WWII Italy and continues in wartime Los Angeles. It is the story of Maria Lagana, who flees Rome with her mother after her father is arrested by the Fascist regime. She rises from the typing pool to associate producer at Mercury Pictures, a B-movie studio with aspirations to play with the big boys at MGM, Warner Brothers, Paramount. The studio execs, rival siblings Artie and Ned Feldman, don't let a shady deal pass them by and soon Artie is being called to testify before Congress for violating censorship protocol. As a daughter of the Greatest Generation, I saw many characteristics in the characters that I observed in my own parents. Theirs was a generation focused on survival. First, during the Great Depression and then World War II. Like my parents here in ... - JHSiess Where’s the statement you plan to read before Congress?” Maria asked. “I’ll edit it this afternoon.”

Mercury Pictures Presents by Anthony Marra | Waterstones

I can’t show a husband and wife faithfully married for fifty years sleeping in the same bed without that two-bit Torquemada Joe Breen farting brimstone on me. And yet the pope’s private chapel has more southern exposure than a ballpark bathroom at the bottom of the seventh.” Not only is Mercury Pictures Presents a fabulous story, it’s Anthony Marra’s intriguing style of writing and his unlikely descriptions that makes the novel so entertaining and thought provoking. New York Times reviewer Matthew Specter provides this example from the book: A rusted-out rowboat decaying on a bank is presented as “a visual index of local fungi and a nursery for deciduous saplings.” Both clever and artful, Marra’s writing aptly reflects the characters of the story. This gave me my first glimpse into what was transpiring on the US West coast right after Pearl Harbor, not to mention how the film industry was used by the government. As the story goes on, at times there’s almost a hallucinatory quality to the story. How do you feel different characters experience exile, both at home and abroad? How do invisible prisons differ from real ones? Like Philip Roth’s classic The Plot Against America, Anthony Marra’s Mercury Pictures Presents is an explicitly political novel that reminds us of the fault lines running through American society and correcting images of America’s mythic and heroic past. Perhaps heroic for some, but not for America’s immigrants and racial and ethnic minorities. Mercury Pictures Presents will stand as a classic novel of the run-up and early years of World War Two in America.I loved the first half of the book and thought it worthy of 5 stars. My enthusiasm waned as the book got lengthier and more involved. The book ended on a stronger note with its epilogue. The epilogue provided a satisfying closure to the novel; I enjoyed how it tied up loose threads about the more major characters and explained where they were in their lives. And Maria had evolved by then to have more warmth and charm. This month, Anthony Marra will join our book club meeting to discuss his inspiration behind the story. To accommodate his schedule, we will be meeting on Thursday, February 16 at 7:00 pm EST.

Mercury Pictures Presents by Anthony Marra | Goodreads Mercury Pictures Presents by Anthony Marra | Goodreads

I was misquoted. I never called him ‘great.’” Artie tossed the script on his desk and peeled off his hairpiece. His liver-spotted scalp resembled a slab of pimento loaf. Maria always found the sight of it oddly moving, a sign of the trust established over the ten years they had worked together. Artie allowed no one else at Mercury to see him in between toupees. He turned to her and said, “What do you think—any chance we can salvage this?” German was the language Anna thought, counted, dreamed, prayed, and cursed in; it was lovely to remember that it could be beautiful, even if she knew Germany too well to ever speak German beautifully again." Later, she helped the U.S. military in its war effort against Germany.Set in 1940s Hollywood, soon peopled with refugees from fascist Europe, it is the story of Maria whose socialist father was sentenced to internal exile in Mussolini’s Italy. She and her mother immigrated to America, and now she is associate producer at Mercury Pictures, underpaid and uncredited. Her boss Mercury studio founder Artie Feldman names his toupees and is mired in a never-ending battle over studio control with his twin brother. Maria loves a Chinese American, but miscegenation laws force them to keep their relationship under wraps. Her father, in exile, had saved the life of a young man, Nino, whose mother takes him in. He helps the boy with an education. Nino escapes Italy using a false identity, and years later he seeks out Maria to tell her what had happened to her father. 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 Marra has wrung from the English language.” —Sara Nović Marra’s characters are wonderfully drawn. I felt for them. They come from around the world and end up in Los Angeles, but more specifically Hollywood. Some become new people before they arrive, others after they meet new employers and realize what is wanted or needed. Even now, a few days after I finished reading, I can see some of these people in my mind’s eye: one at her desk or with Artie, another always with his camera, still another working on the miniatures, and last, a man I came to really like talking with Bela Lugosi about life in Hollywood. In Mercury Pictures Presents . . . the story moves between the real war and the better version Hollywood is busy creating. Sometimes tragic, often hilarious’ KAREN JOY FOWLER, Observer, Books of the Year Mercury Pictures Presents showcases imperfect people in an imperfect world groping to connect, all from an author who continues to pen perfection.