Título: Mercury Pictures Presents: A Novel
Autor: Anthony Marra
Sinopse: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Includes a behind-the-scenes conversation with bestselling novelist Amor Towles • The epic story of a brilliant woman who must reinvent herself to survive in 1940s Hollywood and fascist Europe, a timeless tale of love, deceit, and sacrifice—and a perfect book club pick—from the award-winning author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
“A genuinely moving and life-affirming novel that’s a true joy to read.”—Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere
“A gorgeous book . . . sublime.”—The New York Times (Editors’ Choice)
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: NPR, The Guardian, Booklist
Like many before her, Maria Lagana has come to Hollywood to outrun her past. Born in Rome, where every Sunday her father took her to the cinema instead of church, Maria immigrates with her mother to Los Angeles after a childhood transgression leads to her father’s arrest.
Fifteen years later, on the eve of America’s entry into World War II, Maria is an associate producer at Mercury Pictures, trying to keep her personal and professional lives from falling apart. Her mother won’t speak to her. Her boss, a man of many toupees, has been summoned to Washington by congressional investigators. Her boyfriend, a virtuoso Chinese American actor, can’t escape the studio’s narrow typecasting. And the studio itself, Maria’s only home in exile, teeters on the verge of bankruptcy.
Over the coming months, as the bright lights go dark across Los Angeles, Mercury Pictures becomes a nexus of European émigrés: modernist poets trying their luck as B-movie screenwriters, once-celebrated architects becoming scale-model miniaturists, and refugee actors finding work playing the very villains they fled. While the world descends into war, Maria rises through a maze of conflicting politics, divided loyalties, and jockeying ambitions. But when the arrival of a stranger from her father’s past threatens Maria’s carefully constructed facade, she must finally confront her father’s fate—and her own.
Written with intelligence, wit, and an exhilarating sense of possibility, Mercury Pictures Presents spans many moods and tones, from the heartbreaking to the ecstatic. It is a love letter to life’s bit players, a panorama of an era that casts a long shadow over our own, and a tour de force by a novelist whose work The Washington Post calls “a flash in the heavens that makes you look up and believe in miracles.”
Contexto da obra
Como livro em inglês, esta obra costuma ganhar também uma camada própria de interesse editorial e linguístico. “Mercury Pictures Presents: A Novel”, de Anthony Marra, publicado pela editora Hogarth, em 2023 e com 448 páginas, integra a categoria Livros em Inglês. Por isso, o interesse da obra tende a se ampliar quando o leitor considera também a relação com a língua em que ela circula.
Editora: Hogarth
Páginas: 448
Ano: 2023-06-27
Edição:
Linguagem: en
ISBN: 0451495217
ISBN13: 9780451495211
Sobre a editora
Os livros da editora Hogarth apresentam narrativas densas e multifacetadas que exploram conflitos humanos profundos, muitas vezes em ambientes contemporâneos marcados por tensões sociais e pessoais. As histórias costumam se concentrar em personagens que enfrentam crises internas e externas, como famílias desfeitas, buscas por identidade e desafios éticos, em contextos que vão desde o cotidiano urbano até cenários mais isolados ou históricos. O tom varia entre o dramático e o introspectivo, com ritmo que ora acelera em momentos de tensão, ora desacelera para reflexões mais íntimas. O catálogo sugere uma predileção por narrativas que combinam elementos psicológicos com questões sociais, frequentemente atravessadas por dilemas morais e relações complexas.
