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To make a book convincing, it's less important that the right tree be in the right place than that the characters are emotionally real.
Anthony Marra -
After spending the last few years working on a serious novel set in Chechnya, I was drawn to both the brevity and casualness of Twitter, and wrote a series of tweets titled 'The Erotic Inner Life of Mr. Bates from Downton Abbey.'
Anthony Marra
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I had assumed I'd pack my bags and head elsewhere after 'Constellation,' but Chechnya is creeping its way into the margins of my second book.
Anthony Marra -
No one reaches the Oval Office without a great deal of admiration for the institution - and himself - so it's unsurprising that sitting presidents favor the biographies of former presidents.
Anthony Marra -
A novel can grant humanity even to those who act inhumanely, and by making men and women of monsters, it can offer not only a ground-level view of a particular conflict, but a descent into the substratum of human nature capable of the incomprehensible.
Anthony Marra -
Usually I spend a long while working alone before letting anyone read what I've written.
Anthony Marra -
When you're writing in big block paragraphs, you can afford to have a redundant sentence now and then, but the Twitter format requires concision.
Anthony Marra -
For the uninitiated, 'Calvin and Hobbes' is a daily comic strip detailing the antics of an unruly six-year-old and his misanthropic stuffed tiger. The boy, whose vocabulary is packed with more 10-dollar words than a GRE flashcard set, is named after John Calvin, the Reformation-era theologian who preached the doctrine of predestination.
Anthony Marra
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I stopped by Politics & Prose to sign a few copies of 'Constellation.' A couple days later, I learned that Barack Obama also stopped by and left with one of them.
Anthony Marra -
Bill Watterson argued with his medium even as he eclipsed it. He was all too aware that no artistic expression better exemplifies our disposable consumer culture than the daily newspaper comic strip: today's masterpiece is tomorrow's birdcage lining.
Anthony Marra -
I quickly realized I live the least interesting literary life imaginable. My parents are happily married. There haven't been any major traumas. I'm not sure that the story of my life would be much fun to read.
Anthony Marra -
Calvin and Hobbes are the only two characters from my childhood reading that I return to with any regularity, and they have grown with me, yielding newer and deeper meaning.
Anthony Marra -
There was something about the idea of Russia that I found very intriguing, and I think I had romanticized it a lot.
Anthony Marra -
At Grozny TV, the line between journalism and government propaganda is traversed as often as a Manhattan crosswalk.
Anthony Marra