Anthony Marra
Anthony Marra
Anthony Marra is an American fiction writer...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
CountryUnited States of America
confronted experience foreign realm
When confronted with the facts of foreign atrocities, the experience is often consigned to the realm of the unimaginable. Fiction makes the unimaginable imaginable.
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I joined a writing class at a nearby community center, where I was the youngest participant by about 40 years. Once a week, I'd funnel down a staircase and join the dozen retirees crowded in folding chairs around a table to discuss one another's stories.
age hit people
I'm wondering when you hit the age where people say, 'Oh, OK, he's not so young.'
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I wanted to be a writer, but at the time, I spent my days working a retail job, my nights sleeping in my childhood bedroom, and while I had written short stories here and there, I didn't know how to write good fiction anymore than I knew how to perform good brain surgery.
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Ever since studying in Russia as a college student, I had been in a long-distance, one-sided love affair with Chechnya's remarkable history, culture and rugged natural beauty.
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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.
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You look at a surgeon as you would a secular priest, almost, if it's your child, if it's your sister on the operating table. That was an idea that very much has interested me and I've wanted to explore for some time.
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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.'
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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.
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A novel can enlarge the empathy and imagination of both its author and its reader, and my experience, that sense of enlargement is most intense when I'm transported beyond the narrow limits of my daily life.
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During the 20th century, Chechnya was written about by local poets and novelists, as well as writers from Russia and Central Asia, but very little is available in English translation.
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Despite my best efforts, word that an American tourist was in town quickly made its way around Grozny. That I had come to Chechnya not for business or NGO work, but to see the sites and meet the people, was notable enough to be broadcast throughout the republic.
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My first real awareness of Chechnya came when I was a college student studying in Russia. I arrived in St. Petersburg about two months after Anna Politkovskaya was assassinated for her reports on Chechnya. I lived with an elderly woman and her grown children in an apartment that was not too far from the neighborhood military cadet school.
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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.