A Fiction

By Louise Glück

Favorite Quote: “Once time, Marigold repeated to herself, leaving out the upon. She was trying to hear what the book wanted. Then she listened and waited. But the book was completely silent in that way of nonexistent things. I will wait as long as I have to, Marigold thought. When the book is ready to talk it will talk. Like us, Marigold thought. Like Rose and me.”

From the Publisher: 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 The 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.

Simultaneously sad and funny, and shot through with a sense of stoic wonder, this small miracle of a book, following thirteen books of poetry and two collections of essays, is unlike anything Glück has written.

Dimensions: 5.5 x 7.75 inches

55 pages, Hardcover