NEW RELEASE BOOK – MEDIA UPDATE – FICTION: The Mare by Mary Gaitskill

Media Update | 24 August 2016 | Reply

NEW RELEASE BOOK – MEDIA UPDATE

FICTION: The Mare by Mary Gaitskill

Serpent’s Tail
August 2016
Paperback, $29.99
448 pages

Literary Fiction

A profound, important novel about how love and family are shaped by race, class and privilege.

Ginger is forty-seven and a recovering alcoholic when she meets and marries Paul. It’s too late for her to have a baby of her own, so she tries to persuade him to consider adoption, but he already has a child and doesn’t share her longing to be a parent. As a compromise, they sign up to an organisation that sends poor inner-city kids to stay with country families for a few weeks in the summer, so one hot July day Velveteen Vargas arrives in their lives, and Ginger is instantly besotted.

Velvet is an eleven-year-old Dominican girl from one of Brooklyn’s toughest neighbourhoods. Bemused by her gentle middle-aged hosts, but deeply intuitive in the way of clever children, Velvet quickly senses the longing behind Ginger’s affection for her. Although she can’t reciprocate, the two of them do forge a bond, but when Ginger begins to entertain fantasies of adopting Velvet, things begin to get complicated.

Narrated in turn by Velvet and Ginger, Mary Gaitskill has created a devastating portrait of the unbridgeable gaps between people, and the way we long for fairytale endings even when we know they don’t exist. Heartbreakingly honest and utterly convincing, it marks her triumphant return.

Praise for The Mare:

‘Gaitskill’s work feels more real than real life and reading her leads to a place that feels like a sacred space.’

– Boston Globe

‘Velvet is that most wonderful of fictional creations: a convincing child who manages to be a captivating and perceptive narrator.’

– New Yorker

‘Gaitskill’s novel is not a children’s book, but it is a book about what children long for, and how we long for the same thing many years after we’ve left childhood behind.’

– The New York Times

About the Author:

‘Writing is…. being able to take something whole and fiercely alive that exists inside you in some unknowable combination of thought, feeling, physicality, and spirit, and to then store it like a genie in tense, tiny black symbols on a calm white page. If the wrong reader comes across the words, they will remain just words. But for the right readers, your vision blooms off the page and is absorbed into their minds like smoke, where it will re-form, whole and alive, fully adapted to its new environment.’

Mary Gaitskill is the author of the story collections Bad Behavior, Because They Wanted To, and Don’t Cry, and the novels Veronica and Two Girls Fat and Thin. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories, and the O. Henry Prize Stories.