Reviews for The Lost and Found and Other Stories

“Ms. Marsella’s style of storytelling brings to mind folk tales and recent Latin American fiction… her writing is precise and has the rare ability to be both oratorical and intimate. Her use of language is erudite, incantatory, occasionally fanciful. The stories are earthy and spiritual, particular and universal, and often very sly and funny. The range and diversity Anne Marsella displays, stunning for a first collection, give convincing proof of a fresh talent emerging with full, and impressive power.”

Daniel Woodrell
- New York Times Book Review
(for full article see: )

“This first book, a story collection showing immense mastery of character, dialect, and narrative, won the 1993 Elmer Holmes Bobst Award for Emerging Writers. Born in Fresno, California, Marsella lives in Paris and writes largely about people of the underclasses or Third World, men and women from places like Chile, Nigeria, Istanbul, Morocco, and Mexico, slipping like a cat into myriad psyches and argots. Though she writes usually in a voice mirroring that of her characters, she fears no oddity of language, coming up with nutty tidbits that drive you to the dictionary. In “Miss Carmen,” a Chilean woman arrives in “the valley of San Joaquin,” in California, gets a job polishing silver for a rich woman, gets a crush on a Mexican foreman but loses him, perhaps through her own small-minded pride. In “The Roommates,” Mary, a big, lanky girl from Kenya, shares a room in Paris with Selma from Istanbul, then with Selma’s lover, a Greek sweatshop foreman who also happens to be their married boss, and finally, after two years, abandons the dominating Selma to go live with an albino English gentleman in London. In “Testimony,” a Hispanic priest falls obsessively in love with his seminary’s young atheist gardener and finds himself driven to invisibility, or so he thinks, as day by day his own body parts begin disappearing. In the comic title story, an unmarried Mexican woman living in Paris works for four years as a hired clapper for TV’s “Objets Trouvés” (or “The Lost and Found Show”), seeks her lost father through the personals, and, after she’s betrayed by St. Jude, patron saint of the hopeless, finds her self instead.
Distinguished indeed. May Marsella take on the novel.”
- Kirkus

“Most of the characters in the ten stories making up this collection are profoundly alone, usually in a foreign, adopted city. They aren’t exactly lost, however, as the title might indicate: most, in fact, are willfully alone, in part no doubt because of their eccentricities. That’s what makes “The Lost and Found” an interesting book – Anne Marsella’s ability to trace the lives of misplaced people without condescension or melodrama, to imagine the everyday frictions of self-imposed exile…”
Los Angeles Times

« …Tout en adoptant un ton détaché et factuel, l ‘auteur parvient à se glisser dans la personnalité de ses héros et à leur donner vie. Par une sorte de mimétisme, elle restitue les tics de langage et trouve la voix propre à chacun, un anglais estropié , un tour naïf ou fleuri, des arabismes, des mots inventés à la consonance pittoresque. L ‘histoire se présente parfois comme une succession d’épîtres ou comme tissées de monologues qui se répondent et éclairent différents points de vue. Mais, le plus souvent, le narrateur est omniscient et le récit permet de mêler tendresse et ironie, sympathie pour les laissés-pour-compte de l’histoire et leurs tâtonnements, mais aussi dénonciation de l’injustice, de la cupidité et des violences muettes faite à l’individu. Anne Marsella a des trouvailles d’inventivité, de cocasserie, d’humour … »
Yvette Rivière
- Etudes Anglaises

Reviews for Remedy

-This debut novel is one of the most quirky to have hit the shelves for years – and certainly boasts one of the most unusual and entertaining heroines.” Alex Clarke, Red magazine,
**** ‘Must Read’

-Marsella not only breathes life into a tired, old singleton genre but paints a vibrant portrait of Paris via the cultures of its immigrants.” -Metro

- It’s hard not to warm to a character so entirely determined to embrace life. Marsella’s sly wit and spirit of play, not to mention the very oddness of her heroine, ensures this debut novel cannot be easily dismissed… rarely has the state of single womanhood been made to look like such a blast,” Olivia Laing The Guardian (for full review see: )

- The concept is familiar: a lonely romantic is on a quest to find the man of her dreams. But the originality of the writing makes the plot irrelevant. What’s especially appealing here is the access given to the inner voice of such an usual heroine. The traditions of Catholicism (along with the teachings of Islam and the joy of Arabian belly-dancing) are cleverly woven into the story; Remedy addresses her thoughts on love and life to a different Catholic saint each day and each chapter begins with a potted history of their lives. The result is a delightful sort of hagiographer’s Brigit Jones. -The Daily Telegraph
- This is less chick-lit than an insight into one strain of modern expat life: Remedy, the narrator, is fluent in French and appreciated at work, but she befriends outsiders – the Muslim office cleaners, her Egyptian dance teacher, a blind nun –more than she does the natives. An idiosyncratic, deliberate character, she lives at the intersection of an immigrant’s vivid Paris, and her own internal world…she turns what could be a cloying tale into something much stranger – and more charming. - FT Magazine.
- The eponymous heroine of REMEDY is a nice Catholic girl from Florida with an adventurous sexual appetite who works in Paris for A la Mode Online. Every lunchtime, while her colleagues hit the gym, she goes to Mass and entreats that day’s saint to send her an agreeable lover. When not lusting after A La Mode’s gay photographer Jean Claudi, or fighting off the attentions of otherwise inappropriate Frenchmen, she reads Balzac, makes much of her cat Jubilee and muses philosophically. Marsella’s writing is arch, literary… heroines who can do Henry James and Jean-Paul Gaultier are few and far between and should therefore be treasured. –The First Post
- The heroine is named Remedy so it is fair to assume that her company is supposed to be a tonic. An American fashion hack in Paris, she lives in the heart of the quartier cliché, surrounded by colourful characters. There’s a lot of whimsy – but Remedy is irresistible. When not working, she attends Mass with her friend, the blind nun, meditates on the lives of the saints and waits for love. Her romances are the funniest parts of a strangely pleasing novel. –The Times