Anthony Marra
Anthony Marra
Anthony Marra is an American fiction writer...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
CountryUnited States of America
act behind came car crash family help hiding impending last line refusal statement warn
When I came to the last line of 'Car Crash While Hitchhiking,' I read it as a pitiless statement of indifference: a refusal to warn the family of their impending collision, a refusal to help when miraculously spared, a refusal to act on the empathy hiding behind the story's language.
people regularly taken visited
When I visited Chechnya, I was taken aback at first because people would regularly make jokes about kidnapping me.
barack copies couple days few learned left obama politics prose sign stopped
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.
frightened joys research
Research is not an obstacle, something to be frightened of. It can be one of the real joys of writing.
close covers finished
I think after you write something and you're finished with it, there is a sense of loss. That this is a world I can't really re-enter the way that I could when I was working on it. The covers of the book close it to the writer.
knew maybe prefer spent
For the years I spent working on it, 'Constellation' was the only novel I knew how to write, so maybe I still abided by the maxim? Regardless, I prefer the maxim: Write what you want to know, rather than what you already know.
antics comic doctrine john named preached strip stuffed theologian unruly vocabulary whose
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.
largely time waged war
Grozny's been largely rebuilt. But at the same time, I think the war is very much being waged inside its survivors.
chechnya founded linked north tourism travel website wonders
While looking up news from the North Caucasus on Twitter, I was linked to the sanguinely titled 'Seven Wonders of Chechnya Tour' on the website of Chechnya Travel, the postwar republic's first tourism outfit, founded in 2012.
block format requires sentence
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.
alone letting
Usually I spend a long while working alone before letting anyone read what I've written.
characters
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.
spell
I didn't know a single person who had ever been there. I wasn't even sure how to spell Chechnya.
began chechnya final forms northern war
Chechnya forms the bookends to Tolstoy's career. He began writing his first novel, 'Childhood,' while in Starogladovskaya in Northern Chechnya, and his final novel, 'Hadji Murad,' is set in the Russo-Chechen War of the 19th century.