Marigold and Rose: A Fiction

Written by Louise Glück

Narrated by Louise Glück

"Glück's narration, weathered and tender, reveals her gift for storytelling. Her poetic roots are manifest as she dwells on gemlike realizations, which range from the recognition that books and animals do not judge to the desirability of adulthood's "vast cargo of words." This brief but penetrating audio is a treasure, illuminating new insights at every turn."- AudioFile

This program is read by the author.

Marigold and Rose is a magical and incandescent fiction from the Nobel laureate Louise Glück

“Marigold was absorbed in her book; she had gotten as far as the V.” So begins Marigold and Rose, Louise Glück’s astonishing chronicle of the first year in the life of twin girls. Imagine a fairy tale that is also a multigenerational saga; a piece for two hands that is also a symphony; a poem that is also, in the spirit of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, an incandescent act of autobiography.

Here are the elements you’d expect to find in a story of infant twins—Father and Mother; Grandmother and Other Grandmother; bath time and naptime—but more than that, Marigold and Rose is an investigation of the great mystery of language and of time itself, of what is and what has been and what will be. “Outside the playpen there were day and night. What did they add up to? Time was what they added up to. Rain arrived, then snow.” The twins learn to climb stairs, they regard each other like criminals through the bars of their cribs, they begin to speak. “It was evening. Rose was smiling placidly in the bathtub, playing with the squirting elephant which, according to Mother, represented patience, strength, loyalty, and wisdom. How does she do it, Marigold thought, knowing what we know.”

Simultaneously sad and funny, and shot through with a sense of stoic wonder, this small miracle of a book follows thirteen books of poetry and two collections.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Audio
• Release date: Oct 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9781250875945

Louise Glück

Louise Glück (1943-2023) was the author of two collections of essays and thirteen books of poems. Her many awards included the Nobel Prize in Literature, the National Humanities Medal, the Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris, the National Book Award for Faithful and Virtuous Night, the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Triumph of Achilles, the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poems 1962–2012, and the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. She taught at Yale University and Stanford University and lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts.