I was thrilled when I heard Anthony Marra was coming out with a new novel. Honestly, I really didn't care what it was going to be about. His first novel, A CONSTELLATION OF VITAL PHENOMENA was so brilliant that I could barely believe it was his first novel. And he was only 28 years old. Expectations were high for this new novel.

MERCURY PICTURES PRESENTS is nothing like CONSTELLATION. This new novel begins in the 1940's in Los Angeles. It's set in Hollywood. And it's set in Italy and Germany during WW11.

Maria Lagana escapes Rome with her mother. Maria's activist father is left behind and condemned to a life of confino (internal exile) after some of his writing is found by the government. We discover that it was Maria, at the age of twelve, who was the one who brought attention to these writings, and she will live with this guilt the rest of her life. Mother and daughter flee to Los Angeles where they are taken in by three of her mother's sisters. Talk about characters. And this is where Marra shows his ability to inject amazing wit into his stories. By the way; the aunts are named after Marra's own aunts.

Now we're in Hollywood and Maria is hired by Art Feldman to be a producer at his studio, Mercury Pictures. Art and his twin brother are running the show. The brothers are like oil and water. And they only grow farther apart as the story unfolds.

With a vast cast of unique characters, Marra is able to address a myriad of issues that actually echo some of the same issues we are dealing with right now. Issues of race, politics, war, women's rights, and even immigration. Some things change, yet seem to stay the same.

I'm going to be honest and say that this is not an easy novel to read. But the writing is brilliant. Marra's sense of wit and cast of characters is so bright that you will keep thinking of them long after you've turned the last page.



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Anthony Marra
Marra traveled to Calabria where so much of the novel is set. He spent time in Germany. And he's able to portray L.A. so well because he lived there at one time. Sense of place is tantamount to plot for me and Marra has done a super job of it. He always does.

I read MERCURY PICTURES PRESENTS digitally through NetGalley and Hogarth publishing in exchange for an honest review. Honestly, this novel should be on every book club's line up for this season! And now I'm already anticipating Marra's next novel.

A globe-spanning story of WWII Hollywood, with all of its splendors and bigotry. Marra's latest novel is a story about story-tellers, people reinventing their lives after escaping Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Italy, movie-makers spinning dreams, politicians seeking to influence public opinion.

This is historical fiction at its most engrossing!

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

This is not usually the type of book that I am drawn to, but for some reason the description just really brought me in, and boy am I glad! This was a phenomenal book, with lots of ups and downs, and plenty of emotion.

This one was a struggle for me. Too many story lines populated with too many characters and a slow moving plot just left me flat. The author is definitely a gifted writer with much of his prose flowing like poetry and interspersed with humorous lines. I really wish I could have loved this one.

Thanks to NetGalley and Hogarth Press/Random House for the ARC to read and review.

Published by Hogarth on August 2, 2022

Mercury Pictures Presents is a sprawling but tightly controlled novel. Set before and during the Second World War, most key characters are Italian immigrants, although one is an American-born citizen of Chinese ancestry. While the novel is centered around a minor movie studio owned by two estranged brothers, its grand theme is America’s dependence upon and distrust of immigrants. That theme is captured in this description of an immigrant character: “There was nothing he wasn’t willing to fail at. Besides denying his racism, it was his most American quality.”

The brothers who co-founded Mercury Pictures are Artie and Ned Feldman. They had success making silent movies, but larger studios surpassed them with talkies. Ned works in New York handling the financial side of the business. Artie is in Los Angeles, overseeing the operation of the studio. Maria Lagana is Artie’s head of production, having worked her way up from typist.

Maria’s mother fled Italy with Maria when Mussolini exiled Maria's father, a prominent lawyer, to an internment colony in the Italian hinterlands. While in exile, Maria’s father saved young Nino Picone from drowning. He arranges for Nino’s informal adoption by the Cortese family. Nino works as a photographer, often taking passport photos that will be used in forged passports. He plans to travel to America with Maria’s father, who has acquired a forged passport of his own. That plan falls apart but, thanks to an act of sacrifice, Nino comes to America using the passport of Vincent Cortese.

The novel opens with Maria trying to get a proposed Mercury Pictures film approved by the Production Code Administration, a censor that, like the Senate, regards Hollywood as anti-American. Maria is the brains behind some of Mercury’s best films but she can’t get a producer credit, much less an executive position and decent salary, because of her gender. Maria lives with Eddie Lu, an American actor of Chinese ancestry who can’t get a decent role until after Pearl Harbor, when he becomes typecast playing Japanese villains.

Nino has been in the US for three years before he finds the courage to track down Maria in California. Maria blames Nino for abandoning her father but, for reasons she doesn’t quite understand, gives him a job as a photographer at Mercury. Nino works under his assumed identity but is always at risk of being exposed and perhaps branded as an Italian spy.

Foreign spies are on everyone’s mind. One of Mercury’s propaganda films claims that 25,000 Japanese residents of Los Angeles were sabotaging America, justifying the nation’s horrific internment of Japanese Americans because of their ancestry. The hatred that fuels wars causes Mercury to lose German and Italian employees because wartime laws prevent them from working with cameras or chemicals. Maria must carry an enemy alien registration card and will be arrested if she travels outside a small zone in LA.

The plot is a collection of memorable scenes and vignettes. Eddie Lu is a friend of Bela Lugosi, who resents being typecast after Dracula but regrets turning down Frankenstein after Boris Karloff became Hollywood’s go-to monster. Eddie understands what it means to be typecast. He cherishes Ibsen and Shakespeare but will never perform in film as anything other than a Japanese villain. “Studios strove to make ethnic characters more relatable to white America by casting them with actors who supposedly brought them one step closer to Anglo-Saxon: Chinese actors played Japanese characters, Jewish actors played Chinese characters, Catholic actors played Jewish characters, and Protestant actors played Catholic characters.”

In another scene that emphasizes America’s history of racism, the Army recruits a failed architect who works on set design for Mercury to build replicas of Berlin in Utah that can be destroyed in propaganda films. She supervises prison laborers who construct the buildings, including a young black man who insisted on being served at a lunch counter, setting events in motion that ended with the death of a German POW. The innocent teen is serving a life sentence despite playing no part in the German’s death. The architect was born in Germany and, while she is worried that the Army might hold her ancestry against her, she does not face the same kind of bigotry as the black teen.

While the novel tracks the lives of many characters, the story is primarily Maria’s, including the extended family she makes for herself. She is a victim of fascism in Italy and of nationalism in America, losing a father in Italy and a lover in the US while enduring a loss of liberty simply because she fled a country that went to war with America. Her moving story hits home when, in an epilogue, she returns to Italy to learn what she can about her father’s fate.

Mercury Pictures Presents offers a perfect blend of humor and drama. People are awful until a good one comes alone, making simple decency seem remarkable. Social commentary is poignant without becoming overbearing. The story evokes emotion without becoming saccharine. The plot takes the reader on entertaining detours without becoming lost. Dialog is intelligent and surprising. Historical research (cited in the acknowledgements) contributes to a detailed atmosphere, both in Hollywood and Italy. This is an award-worthy novel. I admired everything about it.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

I don't even know where to start in describing this book but here goes. Set primarily in the 1940s, it follows Maria, an Italian émigré who finds work at Mercury Pictures, a B-level film studio in Hollywood. Mercury Pictures soon becomes a home for Europeans fleeing their homelands and their stories become intertwined as the world descends into war. The cast of characters is vast and entertaining with robust backstories of their own, and the setting provides a unique look at life during WWII, covering everything from government propaganda to racism without a heavy hand.

Anthony Marra's prose is completely unique - it's dense and immersive, witty and lyrical - but sometimes to its detriment. There were lines that literally made me laugh out loud ("She was Rubenesque, and, like both painter and deli sandwich, irrefutable proof of Creation's genius.") and others that tugged at my heart ("'We came here to build ourselves a broken a kingdom where only the broken prosper, and then our children hold it against us when we make them whole.' 'Our children aren't whole. They're just broken in more delicate ways by finer instruments.'") but there were just as many that I had to read multiple times to understand.

Despite its challenges, I truly enjoyed 𝗠𝗘𝗥𝗖𝗨𝗥𝗬 𝗣𝗜𝗖𝗧𝗨𝗥𝗘𝗦 𝗣𝗥𝗘𝗦𝗘𝗡𝗧𝗦, a piece of historical fiction that's unlike anything else I've read.

Thanks to Random House & Hogarth Books for the copy to review.

In some ways, Mercury Pictures Presents is a fascinating examination of the ways human lives are caught up in the tides of larger forces--be they governmental, corporate, or social. If only the characters were as interesting as the history they find themselves caught up in. Maria Lagana comes closest to being a great character, but her story is undercut by the sheer scope of this novel. Instead of being the focus, she's too frequently relegated to the sidelines and the preponderance of stories ultimately drowns her out. Lagana immigrated to the United States with her mother after her father, an anti-fascist defense attorney, ran afoul of Mussolini's government. She finds work as a typist at a movie studio named Mercury Pictures, where her experience with governmental censorship makes her an unexpected asset and she quickly rises to the rank of Associate Producer and right hand to the studio head. She is dating a Chinese American actor named Eddie who is reduced to playing stock (racist) villains because no one is willing to cast him as a lead. The story initially sets up censorship as the central conflict as Lagana is preparing for the studio head to testify before Congress, but the arrival of World War II sends the narrative flinging in multiple directions instead, following a multitude of other characters as the story fans out.

Each character is both thwarted by the movements of forces outside of their control and given new opportunities by those same forces. The problem is there's just way too much going on by the end of the book. A story that begins intimately ends up feeling crowded. A novel that begins with a simple purpose ends up drowning in ideas. The most disappointing thing is that Marra can't balance all of the stuff he throws into this novel. He flirts with interesting ideas, then either leaves them unfinished or passes them off by relying on cliches so he can go on to the next idea. For instance, Mercury Pictures starts producing propaganda films to help the government with the war effort, then becomes frustrated when the war footage they are provided doesn't look "real" enough. Marra ultimately only nods to this idea without forming it any further, but then he revisits it by having a war photographer stage battle scenes so he can better capture the reality of them. And even then, he does little more than present the idea to the reader before moving on to the next storyline. This seems to be the entire purpose of using Hollywood as the center of what is clearly actually intended to be a war novel, and yet Marra just leaves this idea hanging unformed.

Mercury Pictures Presents is out of focus. It's trying to do too much, relying on uninteresting characters and overly familiar story beats to hint at too many ideas. It feels like there's a shimmering story in here somewhere (most likely the one about Maria and Eddie stuck in a rigid studio system that the novel opens with) but it's too underdeveloped to celebrate.

Anthony Marra portrays with affectionate snark the daily fortunes of absurd, yet loveable ordinary people. Similar in tone to his acclaimed “A Constellation of Vital Phenomena,” the grim setting this time is Italy under Mussolini and the fate of refugees starting over in Los Angeles’ film industry. Recent Italian émigré Maria is the unrecognized, uber-competent assistant to Artie, a Hollywood producer “whose bald spot had outpaced his toupees.”

Maria’s boyfriend Eddie Lu, a Chinese-American actor, is mistaken (and attacked) as Japanese in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor and given unflattering stereotypical movie roles. Irony abounds as German and Italian refugees are hired to produce US Army propaganda films, while their movements are strictly monitored by the authorities.

Meanwhile, back in Italy, Maria’s father writes highly censored letters to his daughter and hatches an escape plan. Even the minor characters in the novel are drawn in a memorable way. There is an Italian police officer who writes fictitious crime reports in homage to his idol, Arthur Conan Doyle. Or Maria’s great aunts, whose “understanding of Catholicism was so fickle you couldn’t really call it monotheism. It was a protection racket.”

Underlying the story is the recurring tension between real versus fabricated – as seen in the lengths Mercury Pictures takes to make war “look real” on a movie set, or when a young man assumes the identity (and travel papers) of his deceased friend. Don’t let WWII fatigue keep you from this novel – its characters and message are timeless.

I want to thank Random House and NetGalley for the ebook copy of Anthony Marra's Mercury Pictures Presents.

I loved this book! What a treasure of writing, character development, and context and a writing voice that shows so much respect for the story and characters written. Mercury Pictures Presents was everything I really want in a favorite read: strong female voices, a focus on the whole story and not just a resolution or conclusion, well developed characters, and an immersive epic feeling, a sense I want to dive back and a regretting having to put a book down. I felt it was very real and present, often I find it hard to connect to historical fiction as it feels too distant to me but Marra's writing made the book lively and engaging.

I really enjoyed early in the book how I was quickly drawn into Maria's story and voice, she was given the chance to have a clear voice, to come across as confident, and was funny; I also appreciated how the backstory of her childhood was written from the perspective of what it would have been like for a young girl to be trying to process what was happening in Italy and with her family but not fully grasp it (that was really well done). The aunts in California were wonderfully written as well, vibrant and also confident, strong women. I am not a big fan of historical fiction but this felt different,

As the story opens up Marra weaves in important notes about history and the context and timing of the story (Hollywood, WWII, United States, Italy) while remaining true to character development and coming of age vibes.

I hope this book is treasured by other readers. I recommend it for historical fiction fans but also literary fans, perhaps readers who like Evelyn Hugo, Great Circle or fans of the author's previous books, which I have to go read now!

I highlighted too many lines to count — Anthony Marra is back with perfect prose and memorable characters. I can’t wait to press this into the hands of my book club friends.

Astonishing writer Anthony Marra has really outdone himself with this epic, cinematic, sweeping novel about a fictitious second rate film company (Mercury Pictures) in the Hollywood before, during and just after World War II. Sexy, brilliant main character Maria runs the fledgling studio with her keen intelligence and wit while living with the guilt of causing her lawyer father Giuseppe to be imprisoned. This book is full of hilarious, sexy and deeply moving moments that are imprinted on your brain. I loved every single minute. Thank you NetGalley. Thank you Hogarth Books. Bravo.

Before reading <i>Mercury Pictures Presents</i>, I wondered if Anthony Marra could successfully move from the late 1900s and early 2000s back to the early 1940s, and from wartime Chechnya to wartime Hollywood and Italy. Would Marra lose any of his sardonic humor, his quick yet distinctive character sketches, his narrative loop-de-loops that leave readers wondering if they’ve lost track of the plot, only to soon realize that Marra has subtly moved the plot forward? Would Marra’s otherworldly and often brutal scenes of wartime societal disintegration translate to the Second World War American home front and wartime Italy?

The answers are resoundingly <b>yes</b> to all. Marra brings the strengths of <i>A Constellation of Vital Phenomena</i> and <i>The Tsar of Love and Techno</i> to <i>Mercury Pictures Presents</i>. The recent Eastern European history of Marra’s earlier books has been supplanted in <i>Mercury Pictures Presents</i> by Poverty Row Hollywood with its “B” movies inevitably slated for the bottom of Saturday afternoon double-bills. All of Marra’s books can be read as historical fiction, but the link between fiction and history is perhaps closest in <i>Mercury Pictures Presents</i>. Marra holds a firm grasp on the nativist fervor that descended upon Washington, D.C. and invaded Hollywood; on the anti-immigrant waves that bowled over daily life for native- and foreign-born Americans of Asian, German, and Italian descent, with no discernment of politics and little of ethnicity; the terrors of being a Black man, with no cease for armed service members; and the randomness of émigré admission to the US, with desperate people fleeing the Nazis only to be rejected and sent to their deaths in concentration camps.

Marra sneaks into his fiction usually unlikely and unexpected humor. In <i>Mercury Pictures Presents</i>, 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: <i>”’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.’”</i>. Discussing Artie’s forthcoming testimony before a nativist congressional investigating committee, Maria volunteers: <i>”’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’”</i>

Like Philip Roth’s classic <i>The Plot Against America</i>, Anthony Marra’s <i>Mercury Pictures Presents</i> 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. <i>Mercury Pictures Presents</i> will stand as a classic novel of the run-up and early years of World War Two in America.

I would like to thank NetGalley and Random House for providing me with access to an ARC of this five star novel.

Mercury Pictures Presents is a multi-layered story told with humor and pathos. Marra has constructed a cohesive and very readable narrative set before and during WWII with exceptional characters to tell of life under fascist Mussolini and of Hollywood during the war. Twelve-year-old Maria and her mother flee Rome for Los Angeles, leaving behind her father, Giuseppe, who was arrested for anti-fascist activities and exiled to Calabria. The plot diverges into two storylines—one in Italy, one in Hollywood. Giuseppe struggles alone under captivity, while Maria, now 27, is an associate producer for Mercury Pictures. A variety of characters add vibrancy to the story: Artie, owner of Mercury Pictures, with his many toupees named and displayed in his office; Maria’s great-aunts, who each night “intended to pass in their sleep” and read the death notices each morning (“Some people have all the luck,” says Mimi); Ciccio, the funeral director, proposes to Mimi, who envisions the pleasure of tossing a cactus bouquet; Italian Inspector Ferrando, with his clothes covered in cat hair.
One theme running through the novel is of distorted reality. The nature of Hollywood is its artifice, but more so when the government pays Mercury to produce war propaganda. They begin “appropriating enemy propaganda” and staging war scenes to “look more realistic than the real ones.” Conspiracy theories require a “suspension of disbelief… as if reality took the crooked shape of the mind into which it was poured.” The result was Japanese Americans relocated to concentration camps on U.S. soil, and Italian “enemy aliens” relinquishing certain property, registering, and being confined close to home.
Marra’s prose turns from witty to touching with sentences stunningly well-crafted. In his descriptions, every word is important in painting a picture. His language is a delight to read and reread for its unique richness.

Janice Ottersberg
Historical Novels Review, August 2022

Thoroughly engrossing and a refreshing new take on the Hollywood history novel. Delighted to include this title in the August instalment of Novel Encounters, my regular column highlighting the month’s most anticipated fiction for the Books section of Zoomer magazine. (see review at link)

Thank you @penguinrandomhouse for this epic tale of a brilliant woman who must reinvent herself to survive, moving from Mussolini's Italy to 1940s Los Angeles—a timeless story of love, deceit, and sacrifice from the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena.

This is my first time reading Anthony Marra, and I can see that he writes expansively. His prose and the world he describes are as radiant and sometimes glaring as the post-WWII Hollywood lifestyle our protagonist finds herself in.

Maria and her mother leave Italy to escape Mussolini’s harsh rule, as her father has been sentenced to internal exile. In Hollywood, Maria lands a job as a secretary at Mercury Pictures but soon finds herself as a B-movie producer’s assistant. She starts dating a young Chinese American actor, who must play a Japanese in most roles.

𝐌𝐞𝐫𝐜𝐮𝐫𝐲 𝐏𝐢𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞𝐬 𝐏𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬 is dense and intricate, with immigrants playing a significant part and showing how the war and politics impacted people's lives. There are moments when the details cause it to lag, but it shines again. The 1940s Hollywood setting made for a perfect backdrop.

Anthony Marra writes some of the best sentences I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading. You could open this book to a page a random, and spend hours marveling at the prose and witty observations.

I also loved the characters’ interactions and the attention to detail in building up the backstories.

Despite all that I loved, I felt like the characters were missing a thread connecting them to each other. The book felt more like a series of vignettes than a novel. Although this was a bit of a miss for me, I’m looking forward to reading more from Anthony Marra.

Thank you NetGalley and Random House for my ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Maria Lagana leaves Italy for LA to work for Mercury Pictures working her way up to being the right hand to Artie Feldman- one half of the brother duo that owns the studio. It's 1940's in Europe and the war is looming.

Marra does a crafty job of creating characters that you want to root for, ones you want to hate, and ones that are deeply flawed. The characters slowly interact with each other, all of which end up connecting in a loose way. This didn't quite work for me. It's hard to explain exactly why, but I think it was too much of a slog to get through. I wasn't excited to pick it back up, I quickly discovered while I loved Maria's story, I was frustrated and downright bored by some of the other sections. I think there was too much shoved in the middle to get me from start to finish on what this author was trying to convey here. I do have some of his other books on my physical shelves and do plan to give them a try.

I loved the sections with Anna and the miniatures and the storyline with Nino and his passport collection. The small moments are really what wins in this book.

Wow! Marra's deep and universal themes go down easily with the generous helping of compulsively readable, clever prose. This layered look at history--Fascist Italy and then the United States on the brink of World War II--provides lessons for our current climate of censorship and nationalism. Maria's journey of reinvention transports readers through tragedy, love, hope, and otherwise vivid storytelling. By the end I left the story hopeful, but with a taste of melancholy in my mouth for all that could have been avoided. And all this only avoids devolving into a cliché by the hand of Marra's skillful artistic hand.

Maria Lagana is working at Mercury Pictures as an assistant producer for a boss who gives her more opportunities and latitude than most of Hollywood gives to women. Even as the studio is on the verge of going broke, it becomes a haven for those fleeing the horrors that are increasing the world over--those who can't make it big, but who still have big roles to perform in the machinery of movie making...and of the country they have come to call home. And then there's Maria's past that won't stay in the past.

I voluntarily reviewed a complimentary copy of this book which I received from NetGalley and the publisher. All views expressed are my honest opinion.

The publisher describes Anthony Marra's MERCURY PICTURES PRESENTS as a "love letter to bit players"--and what an enticing and apt description that is. Brilliantly written, peopled with vibrant characters, and against a lush historical canvas, Marra's novel is rich and intelligent--highly recommended.

My thanks to Hogarth and to Netgalley for the opportunity and pleasure of an early read.

Wow. Just wow. You'll want to read this slowly (it does, in fact take a little patience) to fully appreciate the web Marra weaves and because small things will resonate across time and space. Set primarily in Italy and Los Angeles, with stops in Germany and the Utah desert, it's the story of Maria, Nico/Vincenzo, Anna, Artie, Eddie, and so many more as they navigate life in fascist Italy (and pre-War Berlin) and in the US, as emigrants and, in Eddie's case, one whose face carries weight. Maria's father, a brilliant lawyer, took on the fascists and for it was sentenced to internal exile, where he rescues a young boy from drowning. Maria and her mother move to LA, where Maria eventually finds a job working for Artie at Mercury Pictures. She keeps the place running but is never fully appreciated until later. This isn't about movies (although it is), it's about the people who make them and the people they love. It's both sprawling and intimate. While this was a horrible era in so many ways, even in the US, there are great kindnesses here that will stick in your mind. And there are the other things such as Annunziata's suitcase of dirt, Artie staring at the ceiling fan, and Anna- oh Anna. Never underestimate anyone in this novel for all is not revealed until the end. Thanks to netgalley for the ARC. A terrific read- highly recommend.