The Tsar of Love and Techno begins in 1930s Leningrad, where a failed portrait artist is tasked by Soviet censors to erase political dissenters from official images and artworks. One day, he receives an antique painting of a dacha inside a box of images meant to be altered. The mystery behind this painting reverberates through the stories that follow, which take us through a century as they thread together a cast of characters including a Siberian beauty queen, a young soldier in the battlefields of Chechnya, the Head of the Grozny Tourist Bureau, a ballerina performing for the camp director of a gulag and many others. Praise for A Constellation of Vital Phenomena 'Storytelling of magical purity, illuminated by hope... Marra is a magnificent writer' The Times 'Extraordinary... a 21st-century War and Peace' New York Times Book Review 'An absolute masterpiece' Sarah Jessica Parker, Entertainment Weekly Marra is the winner of- the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Barnes and Noble Fiction Discover Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Pushcart Prize, the Whiting Writers' Award, the Berlin Prize, the Grand Prix des Lectrices de Elle, the Athens Prize for Literature.