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The Mare Audiobook
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Publisher Description
From the author of Veronica, a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction, comes Mary Gaitskill’s most poignant and powerful work yet: the story of a Dominican girl, the white woman who introduces her to riding, and the horse who changes everything for her.
Velveteen Vargas is an eleven-year-old from Brooklyn who is granted a summer vacation in the country, courtesy of the nonprofit Fresh Air Fund. Her host family is a couple in upstate New York: Ginger, a failed artist on the fringe of Alcoholics Anonymous, and Paul, an academic who wonders what it will mean to “make a difference” in such a contrived situation. Here we see the couple’s changing relationship with Velvet over the course of several years, as well as Velvet’s powerful encounter with the horses at the stable down the road, as Gaitskill weaves together Velvet’s vital inner-city community and the privileged country world of Ginger and Paul.
The timeless story of a girl and a horse is joined with the story of people from different races and socioeconomic backgrounds trying to meet one another honestly. It is a novel that is raw, striking, and completely original.
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“Four excellent narrators tell Velvet’s story through various points of view in alternating chapters. Each narrator perfectly defines the complexities of the character being portrayed, while showing different sides of Velvet…When Velvet’s abusive but loving mother makes a rare appearance, it’s memorable. At times, listeners will be wondering which character is telling the truth—and hoping that Velvet will make the right decisions in the end. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”
— AudioFile
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“Remarkably tender, though thankfully not sentimental…A truthful meditation on the limits of birth and motherhood, surrogate motherhood, and mothering yourself.”
— Entertainment Weekly -
“A novel whose short chapters, told from shifting points of view, make it ideal for reading aloud.”
— New York Times -
“A raw, beautiful story about love and mutual delusion, in which the fierce erotics of mother love and romantic love and even horse fever are swirled together.”
— NPR -
“The juxtaposition of these women’s lives…is dramatic. It’s an education to see how different life looks filtered through the lens of privilege, race, and age.”
— Los Angeles Times -
“Bracing in its rigorous truth seeking, subtle and capacious in its moral vision, Gaitskill’s work feels more real than real life.”
— Boston Globe -
“A rich back-and-forth narrative that encompasses falling in love, growing up, and doing right in worlds of privilege and poverty.”
— Bust -
“National Book Award finalist Gaitskill takes a premise that could have been preachy, sentimental, or simplistic…and makes it candid and emotionally complex, spare, real, and deeply affecting. Gaitskill explores the complexities of love (mares, meres…) to bring us a novel that gallops along like a bracing bareback ride on a powerful Thoroughbred.”
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review) -
“In soaring language that well captures being ‘in the zone,’ whether it’s painting or riding, Gaitskill brings home her theme of the importance of honoring one’s gifts and the hard work of finding the best outlet for creative expression.”
— Booklist -
“The Mare ripples with internal emotional movement, but it is also a physical novel…An exciting read.”
— New York Review of Books
Awards
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An Amazon Best Book of the Month for November 2015
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Winner of an AudioFile Earphones Award
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An AudioFile Editors’ Pick
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One of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2015
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A 2015 New York Times Book Review Notable Book
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A New York Times Editor’s Choice
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One of the New Yorker’s Best Books of 2015
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An NPR Best Book of 2015
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A Kirkus Reviews Pick for 10 Characters You Won't Soon Forget
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Longlisted for the 2017 Baileys’ Women’s Prize for Fiction
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About Mary Gaitskill
Mary Gaitskill is an award–winning author. Because They Wanted To was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1998. Her novel Veronica was a finalist for the 2005 National Book Award and named one of the New York Times’ Ten Best Books of 2005. Her stories and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories (1993), and The O. Henry Prize Stories (1998). Her story “Secretary” was the basis for the film of the same name. She is a recipient of the 2018 Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature.
About the Narrators
Kyla Garcia is an AudioFile Earphones Award–winning narrator. Born and raised in Hoboken, New Jersey, she discovered acting at the age of eight when she played Lady Macbeth in a children’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy. She made her off-Broadway debut at fifteen when she played Dorothy in Oz: A Twisted Musical. Eleven years after she discovered her passion for acting, she would go on to play Lady Macbeth once again in London at the Globe Theatre, where she studied Shakespeare during her third year at Mason Gross School of the Arts. She received her BFA in acting from Rutgers University.
Christa Lewis has narrated over two hundred audiobooks. She is a classically trained actress with a four-year conservatory training in voice and acting. She has a smart and funny vibe, but can also meet the moment in straightforward or somber works of nonfiction thanks to a seventeen-year stint as a newsreader. Christa speaks accent-free German fluently and offers a variety of believable accents and dialects. Her narrations are well received—there have been seven Earphones awards across a variety of genres—YA, literary fiction, biography and memoir—a 2019 SOVAS Voice Arts Award in Biography and two Audie nominations. Pippa Jayne was the Sultry Listeners’ Award Winner 2019 in the Erotica category.
Lloyd James (a.k.a. Sean Pratt) has been a working professional actor in theater, film, television, and voice-overs for more than thirty years. He has narrated over one thousand audiobooks and won numerous Earphones Awards and nominations for the Audie Award and the Voice Arts Award. He holds a BFA degree in acting from Santa Fe University, New Mexico.
Nicol Zanzarella is an Earphones Award–winning audiobook narrator and a theater and television actress. She has appeared in productions of Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, The Winter’s Tale, Cousin Bette, Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, and many others.