A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

From the bestselling author of —dazzling, poignant, and lyrical interwoven stories about family, sacrifice, the legacy of war, and the redemptive power of art.

This stunning, exquisitely written collection introduces a cast of remarkable characters whose lives intersect in ways both life-affirming and heartbreaking. A 1930s Soviet censor painstakingly corrects offending photographs, deep underneath Leningrad, bewitched by the image of a disgraced prima ballerina. A chorus of women recount their stories and those of their grandmothers, former gulag prisoners who settled their Siberian mining town. Two pairs of brothers share a fierce, protective love. Young men across the former USSR face violence at home and in the military. And great sacrifices are made in the name of an oil landscape unremarkable except for the almost incomprehensibly peaceful past it depicts. In stunning prose, with rich character portraits and a sense of history reverberating into the present, is a captivating work from one of our greatest new talents.

Exclusive to Kindle, in Marra’s The Wolves of Bilaya Forest, the wolves — those “capitalists of the animal kingdom”—have returned. Vera Pavlova has lived long enough to know that when this happens and they begin to howl, it means the approach of hunger, the threat of starvation, and the onset of desperation. The woods loom large as Vera grapples with the truth about, and her justification of, what she did to her own mother. And now — as the men cut and package their drugs in her house once a week — what she has done to her own daughter.

Anthony Marra is an M.F.A. candidate at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His piece was chosen, out of hundreds of stories, as the first place winner in The Atlantic’s 2009 Student Writing Contest. His fiction has also appeared in Narrative.