Mary Gordon has 6 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 7 narrators, with an average listener rating of 5★ across 1 ratings. The most-rated is Payback.
Payback
Summary
In this novel of lifelong reckoning between two women by the award-winning Mary Gordon, we meet Quin Archer, the revenge-loving queen of the reality-TV show Payback. Unbeknownst to her many fans, Quin was once an angry teen named Heidi, whose true story may be known only to Agnes, her art teacher at a private New England girls’ school in the 1970s. Then a young woman herself, Agnes saw a spark of originality in the brooding Heidi. But when she suggested Heidi visit the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the girl returned with a disastrous account of having been picked up at the museum by an older man. Agnes’ stunned response will haunt both women for decades. Gordon narrates this tale of #MeToo misunderstanding, from a time before there was language to contain it, with a sharp sense of life’s changing tempo. She takes us through Heidi’s disappearance and reinvention as Quin and Agnes’ escape into career and family in Italy, exploring their choices and potential for happiness until, inevitably, they meet again. Payback is a remarkable book about the precise weight of our words and deeds from a writer whose moral vision is deeply rewarding in its subtlety.
©2020 Mary Gordon (P)2020 Random House Audio
Joan of Arc
Summary
For more than 500 years, the story of Joan of Arc has been an inspiration and a mystery. The least likely of heroines, a peasant girl with no education and no prospects, Joan turned herself into the legendary Maid of Orleans, knight, martyr, and saint. Following a voice she knew was God's, she led an army to victory in battle and crowned the king of France, only to be captured by her English enemies and burned at the stake as a heretic, all by the age of 19. Mary Gordon brings Joan to life with a novelist's rich understanding of character. She does more than tell Joan's story, she explores Joan's mystery, the contradictions and secret desires that propelled her from obscurity to glory.
©2000 Mary Gordon (P)2000 Books on Tape, Inc.
Spending
Summary
An erotic and highly intelligent new novel about women, art, sex, and money from the award-winning author of the New York Times best sellers Final Payments and Men and Angels. Newsweek has called Mary Gordon a "humane, masterly novelist whose great gift is making us care about her people." Monica Szabo, a middle-aged, moderately successful painter, encounters B, a wealthy commodities broker who collects her work. B volunteers to be her muse, offering her everything that male artists have always had to produce great art: time, space, money, and sex. (He is even willing to pose for her.)Soon after she and B become lovers, Monica starts work on a controversial new series of paintings based on her perception that the deposed Christs of Renaissance art were not dead, but post orgasmic. The show of her new work, championed by the critics and picketed by the Christian Right, makes her a media darling and makes her rich. B, meanwhile, suffers a sudden loss of fortune. Will she take care of him as he took care of her? How does he handle his loss of power? How does she? What happens in the bedroom? Passionate, provocative, and highly engaging, Spending displays Gordon's maverick feminism, her extraordinary wit, and her unique perspectives on art, money, men, sex and the desires of women.
©1998 Mary Gordon (P)2010 Audible, Inc.
Final Payments
Summary
When Isabel Moore's father dies, she finds herself, at the age of 30, suddenly freed from eleven years of uninterrupted care for a helpless man. With all the patterns of her life suddenly rendered meaningless, she turns to childhood friends for support, gets a job, and becomes involved with two very different men. But just as her future begins to emerge, her past throws up a daunting challenge. A moving story of self-reinvention, Final Payments is a timeless exploration of the nature of friendship, desire, guilt, and love.
©1978 Mary Gordon (P)2010 Audible, Inc.
The Liar's Wife
Summary
The beloved author at her storytelling best: four wonderful novellas of Americans abroad and Europeans in America. In these absorbing and exquisitely made novellas of relationships at home and abroad, both historical and contemporary, we meet the ferocious Simone Weil during her final days as a transplant to New York City; a vulnerable American grad student who escapes to Italy after her first, compromising love affair; the charming Irish liar of the title novella, who gets more out of life than most of us; and Thomas Mann, opening the heart of a high-school kid in America. These stories dazzle on the surface, with beautifully rendered settings and vistas, and dig deep psychologically. At every turn Gordon reveals in her characters' interactions those crucial flashes of understanding that change lives forever. So richly developed it is hard to believe they fit into novella-sized packages, these tales carry us away both as individual stories and as a larger, book-length experience of Gordon's mastery and human sympathy.
©2014 Mary Gordon (P)2014 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.
The Love of My Youth
Summary
From the acclaimed author of Pearl and Final Payments comes a beautifully choreographed novel about first lovers meeting again after more than 30 years and reimmersing themselves in their shared past. Miranda and Adam, high-school sweethearts now in their late 50s, arrive by chance at the same time in Rome, a city where they once spent a summer deeply in love, living together blissfully. At an awkward reunion, the two who parted in an atmosphere of passionate betrayal in the 1960s and haven't seen each other since are surprised to discover that they may have something to talk about. Both have their own guilt, their sense of who betrayed whom, and their long-held interpretation of the events that caused them not to marry and to split apart into the lives they've led since. Both are married to others, with grown children. For the few weeks they are in Rome, Adam suggests that they meet for daily walks and get to know each other again. Gradually, as they take in the pleasures of the city and the drama of its streets, they discover not only what matters to them now but also more about what happened to them long ago. Miranda and Adam are masterfully portrayed characters, intent upon understanding who they are in relation to who they were. A story about what first love means and how it is shattered, and the lessons old lovers may still have to share with each other many years later, The Love of My Youth is also a poignant look back at the hopes and dreams of a generation and what became of them.
©2011 Mary Gordon (P)2011 Audible, Inc.