Mercury Pictures Presents

Product Information

Artie looked at Maria and across that long stare the musculature conjoining their intuitions flexed. Meanwhile in Los Angeles, Maria has grown up to become an administrative assistant to Artie Feldman, co-owner of a movie production company called "Mercury Pictures". The studio makes B grade movies. As events of World War II gear up, the U.S. War Department contracts with Mercury Pictures to film propaganda movies promoting the nation's involvement in the war. The author's sense of humor lightens the heavy subject matter and makes the antics in Hollywood more fun to read about. Still, both Maria and Artie come across as 'cold fish'. For years, Maria had devised strategies for smuggling the profane beneath the most sensitive censorial snouts. At her best, she passed more colorful bullshit than Babe the Blue Ox.

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We have 4 read-alikes for Mercury Pictures Presents, but non-members are limited to two results. To see the complete list of this book's read-alikes, you need to be a member. The following is from Anthony Marra's Mercury Pictures Presents . Marra is the New York Times bestselling author of The Tsar of Love and Techno and A Constellation of Vital Phenomena , winner of the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and longlisted for the National Book Award.

Beyond the Book

Funny, verbally inventive and, ultimately, very moving, Mercury Pictures Presents is a wonderful novel.

MERCURY PICTURES PRESENTS | Kirkus Reviews MERCURY PICTURES PRESENTS | Kirkus Reviews

While Marra's pleasure in the details and argot of the past occasionally feels like overkill, this tough-minded, funny outing exemplifies what Maria calls the democratic promise of 'the miniaturist's gaze,' in which 'all were worthy.' Thanks to Marra, the pleasure is contagious. You know what? I think Michael Angelo would have done very well in Hollywood. To get away with that, and on the pope’s ceiling. How do you think he did it?”

Media Reviews

People like you and me, Art? The sons of furriers and cobblers and glovers who’ve been in the business since the battles with the Edison Trust? We came out here to build ourselves a broken kingdom where only the broken prosper, and then, our children, they hold it against us when we make them whole.” Well that was freaking stupendous. I laughed, I cried, I marveled at the illustration of man's inhumanity to man. No really, no shade, all those things happened as I read this gorgeous book. And speaking of gorgeous, the prose! Brilliant line after brilliant line. Fifteen years later, on the eve of America’s entry into World War II, Maria is an associate producer at Mercury Pictures, trying to keep her personal and professional lives from falling apart. Her mother won’t speak to her. Her boss, a man of many toupees, has been summoned to Washington by congressional investigators. Her boyfriend, a virtuoso Chinese American actor, can’t escape the studio’s narrow typecasting. And the studio itself, Maria’s only home in exile, teeters on the verge of bankruptcy. The characters are brilliant. A miniaturist; a man of toupees; a photographer who takes the persona of another. The story is humorous and sobering as the European war begins to rage. The racism and sexism surrounding these emigrants and the ridicule they faced. Shameful.