The Mare Mary Gaitskill by Mary Gaitskill 9781788168670, 1788168674 instant download after payment.

“Ms Gaitskill is such a preternaturally gifted writer that nearly every page of The Mare shimmers with exacting and sometimes hallucinatory observation.”  -  Dwight Garner, The New York Times 

Velveteen Vargas is eleven years old, a Fresh Air Fund kid from Brooklyn. 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. 

The Mare illuminates 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 Mary Gaitskill weaves together Velvet's vital inner-city community and the privileged country world of Ginger and Paul. 

“The Mare is indebted, in its narrative strategy, to As I Lay Dying, another novel that employs a host of recurring narrators to get at the tangled intricacies of family life. There is a certain loom-like effect at work in both books, a warp-and-woof texture, visible only to the reader, produced by the interwoven sets of impressions . . .  On horseback, Velvet is in her own, untouchable place, and Gaitskill’s sentences lift their necks and pick up speed to match her movements stride for stride.”  -  Alexandra Schwartz, The New Yorker 

The timeless story of a girl and a horse is joined with the timeless story of people from different races and socioeconomic backgrounds trying to meet one another honestly in a novel that is raw, striking, and completely original.