The Tsar of Love and Techno: Stories

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.

A story of the transcendent power of love in wartime, is a work of sweeping breadth, profound compassion, and lasting significance.

Two doctors risk everything to save the life of a hunted child in this majestic debut about love, loss, and the unexpected ties that bind us together. “On the morning after the Feds burned down her house and took her father, Havaa woke from dreams of sea anemones.” Havaa, eight years old, hides in the woods and watches the blaze until her neighbor, Akhmed, discovers her sitting in the snow. Akhmed knows getting involved means risking his life, and there is no safe place to hide a child in a village where informers will do anything for a loaf of bread, but for reasons of his own, he sneaks her through the forest to the one place he thinks she might be safe: an abandoned hospital where the sole remaining doctor, Sonja Rabina, treats the wounded.

Though Sonja protests that her hospital is not an orphanage, Akhmed convinces her to keep Havaa for a trial, and over the course of five extraordinary days, Sonja’s world will shift on its axis and reveal the intricate pattern of connections that weaves together the pasts of these three unlikely companions and unexpectedly decides their fate.