Anthony Marra is the author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (2013), which won the National Book Critics Circle’s inaugural John Leonard Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in fiction, the Barnes and Noble Discover Award, and appeared on over twenty year-end lists. Marra’s novel was a National Book Award long list selection as well as a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and France's Prix Medicis. He received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, where he teaches as the Jones Lecturer in Fiction. He has lived and studied in Eastern Europe, and now resides in Oakland, California. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is his first novel.
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A Constellation of Vital PhenomenaA Novel
At the end of the hall, through the partially opened waiting-room door, she saw the hemline of a black dress, the gray of once-white tennis shoes, and a green hijab that, rather than covering the long black hair, held the broken arm of a young woman who was made of bird bones and calcium deficiency, who believed this to be her twenty-second broken bone, when in fact it was merely her twenty-first.
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena:A Novel -
A Constellation of Vital PhenomenaA Novel
When a ten-second spray of gunfire flooded the sky, Havaa couldn’t have imagined it was directed at eight villagers deemed too dangerous to be transported to the Landfill. Lying on the mossy topsoil for hours, she thought of her father’s defeat the previous afternoon. She knew that Russian soldiers could destroy a village, but she hadn’t known her father could lose a chess match.
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena:A Novel -
A Constellation of Vital PhenomenaA Novel
There is the night, the last night, the next night. The belt around your ankle, the two taps of the syringe, the blood into the barrel, the plunger pushing in. There is the woman named Anzhela but called Natasha. The woman named Nadya but called Natasha. The woman named Natasha, called Natasha.
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena:A Novel
“[E]xtraordinary… Each story is a gem in itself. But the book is greater than its parts, an almost unbearably moving exploration of the importance of love, the pull of family, the uses and misuses of history, and the need to reclaim the past by understanding who you really are and what really happened.” —Sarah Lyall, The New York Times [on The Tsar of Love and Techno]
“A flash in the heavens that makes you look up and believe in miracles . . . Here, in fresh, graceful prose, is a profound story that dares to be as tender as it is ghastly, a story about desperate lives in a remote land that will quickly seem impossibly close and important . . . I haven’t been so overwhelmed by a novel in years. At the risk of raising your expectations too high, I have to say you simply must read this book.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post [on A Constellation of Vital Phenomena]
“Over and over again, this is an examination of the ways in which many broken pieces come together to make a new whole. In exquisite imagery, Marra tends carefully to the twisted strands of grace and tragedy . . . Everything in A Constellation of Vital Phenomena . . . is dignified with a hoping, aching heartbeat.” —Ramona Ausubel, The San Francisco Chronicle
Selected Works
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