The Tsar of Love and Techno
Stories
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Narrated by:
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Mark Bramhall
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Beata Pozniak
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Rustam Kasymov
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By:
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Anthony Marra
About this listen
2016 American Academy of Arts and Letters Lit. Award Winner
2015 National Book Critics Circle Awards, Short-listed
2016 National Magazine Award for Fiction, Winner
2018 Simpson Prize, Short-listed
From the New York Times best-selling author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena - 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, The Tsar of Love and Techno is a captivating work from one of our greatest new talents.
©2015 Anthony Marra (P)2015 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Skating On The Thin Ice Of Life
- By Sara on 04-29-17
By: Jessica Shattuck
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Grand Central
- Original Stories of Postwar Love and Reunion
- By: Melanie Benjamin, Amanda Hodgkinson, Pam Jenoff, and others
- Narrated by: Carla Mercer-Meyer
- Length: 12 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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On any particular day, thousands upon thousands of people pass through New York City's Grand Central Terminal, through the whispering gallery, beneath the ceiling of stars, and past the information booth and its beckoning four-faced clock, to whatever destination is calling them. It is a place where people come to say hello and good-bye. And each person has a story to tell.
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Grand Central: Memories
- By ZacharyKindle Customer on 05-03-17
By: Melanie Benjamin, and others
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Dark at the Crossing
- By: Elliot Ackerman
- Narrated by: Vikas Adam
- Length: 7 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Haris Abadi is a man in search of a cause. An Arab American with a conflicted past, he is now in Turkey, attempting to cross into Syria and join the fight against Bashar al-Assad's regime. But he is robbed before he can make it, and is taken in by Amir, a charismatic Syrian refugee and former revolutionary, and Amir's wife, Daphne, a sophisticated beauty haunted by grief. As it becomes clear that Daphne is also desperate to return to Syria, Haris's choices become ever more wrenching: Whose side is he really on?
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Beautiful Story Well Told
- By Michael - Audible Editor on 01-07-17
By: Elliot Ackerman
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Gorky Park
- The Arkady Renko Novels, Book 1
- By: Martin Cruz Smith
- Narrated by: Henry Strozier
- Length: 14 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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A triple murder in Moscow’s famous Gorky Park amusement centre rocks the capital - three corpses found in the snow, so badly mutilated that their identities can’t be verified. Chief Investigator Arkady Renko from the Moscow police takes the case. Renko is a brilliant investigator - dangerously so. Now, to identify the victims and uncover the truth, he must battle the KGB, FBI and the police - and stay alive doing it.
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Mispronunciations distracting
- By Libby on 07-12-19
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Suspect
- By: Michael Robotham
- Narrated by: Simon Prebble
- Length: 11 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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After a woman is brutally slain, investigators bring psychiatrist Joe O'Loughlin in for expert consultation. Joe is shocked to discover the dead woman is a former patient of his who cried rape when he rebuffed her sexual advances. Citing doctor/patient confidentiality, Joe hides this information. But the truth emerges, and suddenly he is the prime suspect.
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reviewers love it or hate it -- i loved it
- By Kelly on 03-23-14
By: Michael Robotham
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The Dutch Wife
- By: Ellen Keith
- Narrated by: Abby Craden, Eric Martin, Charlie Thurston
- Length: 10 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Amsterdam, May 1943. As the Nazis tighten their grip across the city, the last signs of Dutch resistance are being swept away. Marijke de Graaf and her husband are arrested and deported to different concentration camps in Germany. Marijke is given a terrible choice: to suffer a slow death in the labor camp or - for a chance at survival - join the camp brothel. On the other side of the barbed wire, SS Officer Karl Müller arrives at the camp hoping to meet his father’s expectations of wartime glory. When he encounters the newly arrived Marijke, their lives change forever.
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Holocaust Porn???
- By Peteylovesyou on 08-03-19
By: Ellen Keith
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The Yiddish Policemen's Union
- A Novel
- By: Michael Chabon
- Narrated by: Peter Riegert
- Length: 12 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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For 60 years Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in the federal district of Sitka, a temporary safe haven created in the wake of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. The Jews of the Sitka District have created their own little world in the Alaskan panhandle, a vibrant and complex frontier city that moves to the music of Yiddish. But now the district is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their dream is coming to an end.
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Didn't finish...
- By Ann E O'Connor on 10-16-17
By: Michael Chabon
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The Blind Assassin
- By: Margaret Atwood
- Narrated by: Margot Dionne
- Length: 18 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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For the past twenty-five years, Margaret Atwood has written works of striking originality and imagination. In The Blind Assassin, she stretches the limits of her accomplishments as never before, creating a novel that is entertaining and profoundly serious. The novel opens with these simple, resonant words: "Ten days after the war ended, my sister drove a car off the bridge." They are spoken by Iris, whose terse account of her sister Laura's death in 1945 is followed by an inquest report proclaiming the death accidental.
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Good book, TERRIBLE audio!
- By Whitney on 04-27-09
By: Margaret Atwood
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The Bone Clocks
- By: David Mitchell
- Narrated by: Jessica Ball, Leon Williams, Colin Mace, and others
- Length: 24 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Following a scalding row with her mother, 15-year-old Holly Sykes slams the door on her old life. But Holly is no typical teenage runaway: A sensitive child once contacted by voices she knew only as "the radio people," Holly is a lightning rod for psychic phenomena. Now, as she wanders deeper into the English countryside, visions and coincidences reorder her reality until they assume the aura of a nightmare brought to life.
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Not Short Listed, This Time
- By Mel on 09-23-14
By: David Mitchell
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Her Body and Other Parties
- Stories
- By: Carmen Maria Machado
- Narrated by: Amy Landon
- Length: 8 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies.
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Beautiful
- By Anonymous User on 11-17-17
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Guapa
- By: Saleem Haddad
- Narrated by: Fajer Al-Kaisi
- Length: 9 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Rasa spends his days translating for Western journalists and pining for the nights when he can sneak his lover, Taymour, into his room. One night Rasa's grandmother - the woman who raised him - catches them in bed together. The following day Rasa is consumed by the search for his best friend, Maj, a fiery activist and drag queen star of the underground bar Guapa, who has been arrested by the police.
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Guapa
- By Mah Maass on 08-25-16
By: Saleem Haddad
What listeners say about The Tsar of Love and Techno
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Neyda
- 02-02-16
Fantastic read!
Highly recommend this audio book. Beautiful collection of stories that tie neatly together. Authentic performances from the voice actors and actresses.
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- W Perry Hall
- 10-08-15
The Nutcracker's Cosmonautic March
I normally find it difficult to complete even half of a short story collection, except on the rare occasion the stories are intertwined by characters and events. I'll listen to 1 or 2 but eventually go back to the traditional Freytag's Pyramid, invest myself in a novel, and then forget about the collection of nice, but not compelling, stories.
In comparison, I quickly became absorbed by the lofty TSAR OF LOVE AND TECHNO because, for one thing, the first story is both chilling and compelling, and another, these stories make you want to discover the interlacing threads and watch the magic of the completed whole. That is to say, the reader learns through each story which characters are primary, and discovers that character has returned in a later story in some other context. The stories so complement the others that, aside from the 1st, 3d and 4th stories, I'm not sure the others would have nearly the impact they do had any one of them stood on its own outside the context of the collection.
I enjoyed the entire collection excepting the second story. Should you get annoyed by the shrew's narration, stick with the book; while irritating in itself, the second story adds pieces to the whole. In hindsight, the structure seems hard to have pulled off, but I couldn't tell at the time because of the seeming simplicity of each story (all of which were structured brilliantly).
These stirring stories center on an uncle and nephews, a pair of brothers, a couple, a mother (and daughter), a girl (and grandmother) and a painting, and occur variously at three locales of the former Soviet Union (Leningrad/St. Petersburg, Kirovsk [in Siberia to the east of China] and within Chechnya). The first story is set in 1937 during the Stalin purge [“In order to become the chisel that breaks the marble inside us, the artist must first become the hammer," said the Soviet censor of paintings and photos.] The remaining tales occur primarily between the mid-1990s and 2013. They hit on a wide array of subjects like censorship, Russian art, the breakup of the Soviet Union, Tchaikovsky, Tolstoy, Russians in Chechnya, mine fields, the nuclear age and outer space, and art (in life and capturing life in art). IMAGES - mix tapes, leopard bikini bottoms, a ballerina, a painting of an empty Chechen field in the afternoon, a lone wolf in the woods for an execution.
This magnificent collection evoked reflection on how circumstances can change people so that basically good people have the capacity to do evil, but how, in all but the most aberrant among us, there's a reservoir of basic goodness in the face of evil. It also aroused my contemplation of the fleeting nature of life, what impression do we really and truly make on a planet we visit so shortly, how small each of us is in relation to time and space, and how Art, above most else, can transcend life.
Anthony Marra is a master at evoking sympathy for characters so foreign to a reader in the U.S., and in his ability to simultaneously create both sympathy and contempt for a character. Even in short stories, knots of complexity surround the six major characters, making them so human, their sentiments so real.
In my opinion, this book is even better than Mr. Marra's debut novel "A Constellation of Vital Phenomena." I believe he has the potential to write a novel for the ages. No exaggerating.
On a side note, I think Marra made up for his debut's hard-to-recall title and its washed out cover with his new Hip title and even Hipper cover.
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10 people found this helpful
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- Louise
- 10-23-15
Best book I've read this year.
Where does The Tsar of Love and Techno rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?
Incredible weaving of stories of Russia from Lenin to present. Absolutely brilliant. Show manipulation of history through doctoring of photos. Shows how corrupt Media is a danger to everyone.
What was one of the most memorable moments of The Tsar of Love and Techno?
The one face appearing over and over.
What does the narrators bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?
Russian accents and depression. I know. My family is Russian.
Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?
The very end.
Any additional comments?
A masterpiece.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Iris Pereyra
- 04-13-16
Brilliant, Delightful & Moving Stories
There’s a certain point when human behavior is so absurd it just becomes compulsively funny.
That is part of what I found delightful about Anthony Marra’s ingenious collection of short stories. The other aspect I very much enjoyed, was the feeling of putting together a puzzle, with each story providing some of the missing pieces until it was finally complete.
The interlocked stories on The Tsar of Love and Techno, are cleverly structured, bizarre, almost surreal. They encompass decades of Soviet history, from the Cold War to the dissolution of the USSR right up to modern-day Putin’s Russia.
The geographical settings include Siberia and St. Petersburg, but its Chechnya and its capital, Grozny that are at the center of most of them.
Marra drops enough cultural and political landmarks to help the reader recognize the historical context, but I personally appreciated The Tsar of Love and Techno more for its ability to recreate the Russian pathos than for giving me history lessons.
I felt in love with Marra’s imagination, his disparate characters with their tongue-in-cheek banter and the vulnerabilities he gives even to those alpha-male soldiers living under the most deplorable conditions in war-ridden regions.
The Tsar of Love and Techno is a beautiful contemplation on the good/evil nature in all of us, the transcendent power of art and the horrific, perhaps irreversible consequences of polluting the environment on the only planet we have.
The multiple narration on this audiobook is top-notch. These narrators truly brought these stories to life!
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2 people found this helpful
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- B. Stromberg
- 05-04-18
Brilliant!
Author Anthony Marra is brilliant, creating characters & a world rich, fierce, & heartbreaking. The stories intertwine, in a fugue gypsies might play. The readers bring authenticity with their accents & phrasing. I felt I was in that space capsule seeing for the first time a world I had never known. Thank you.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Nancy F. Romano
- 04-13-16
Brilliant book; disappointing Audiobook
Only Mark Bramhall brings this dazzling human "novel" to its full potential. The other readers, who sound like native Russian speakers, are not up to the task.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Rufus
- 01-27-17
Great Narration! Complex Story!
Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?
If you like intense history and complex stories requiring thinking and connecting the dots, then this book is for you.
What was one of the most memorable moments of The Tsar of Love and Techno?
The scenes that take place in the "White Forest", a man-made woods of metal trees and plastic leaves constructed in the boon years of Brezhnev ....
What does the narrators bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?
I did like the choice of eastern european accents versus listening to an american accent. Listening to foreign accents is an effort, but made it real for me, as if I was living in those days....
If you could take any character from The Tsar of Love and Techno out to dinner, who would it be and why?
I liked the female voice a lot.... frightened, vulnerable and then so cold and stern. That voice transported me to Russia... But having dinner with her in Russia?! To Go or Not to Go? That is the question.
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- customer
- 03-29-16
I wish Mark Bramhall had narrated the full book
I understand the intent in having a variety of narrators and those with regional accents, but the pacing of the narration was extremely awkward and distracting.
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- Rebecca
- 09-16-16
Terrific story, deplorable narration
This cycle of stories is engrossing. Together they give a remarkable portrait of Soviet and post-Soviet life. Unfortunately, the readers bring the story down with distractingly terrible delivery. It's one thing to have an accent, it's another to sound robotic and cartoonish. I had to switch to the printed book, which I thoroughly enjoyed.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Dusty Desert
- 12-16-16
Narration sucks; book awesome
The stories, the book is one of the best. But of the three narrators, only the first was good. I had a copy of the book to read on my own and I quit listening to the lousy narration. This book is such a treasure that I hope others will read it and not turn away based on the lousy narrators.
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2 people found this helpful