Promise Me

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

"Coleen Marlo puts the enthusiasm and sincerity of the author front and center in the narration. She holds strong emotions in check and reflects the determination that is the major factor in the success of the Komen foundation." AudioFile

"[A] deeply thoughtful, assertive, sensitive memoir of the sisters' growing up and devotion to each other in life and death." ---Publishers Weekly

"A touching, inspiring look behind the scenes at the founding of one of the most famous nonprofit organizations in the world." ---Kirkus

"A tribute to a beloved sibling and recognition of an international organization whose goal is to eradicate the disease that killed her." ---Library Journal Starred Review

The Next Big Story

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From top CNN anchor and special correspondent Soledad O'Brien comes a highly personal look at her biggest reporting moments, from Hurricane Katrina, the tsunami in Southeast Asia, and the devastating Haiti earthquake to the historic elections and high-profile interviews with everyday Americans. Drawing on her own unique background and consciousness as well as her experiences as a journalist at the front lines of the most provocative issues in today's society---and particularly from her work as host of the acclaimed series Black in Americaand Latino in America---O'Brien offers her candid, clear-eyed take on where we are as a country and where we're going.

"Impassioned yet intimate, O'Brien's electrifying memoir demonstrates her instinctive responsibility to present each crisis as a sacred opportunity to illuminate and educate her viewers." ---Booklist

Pilgrims

Elizabeth Gilbert, acclaimed author of "Eat, Pray, Love", personally chose actor Coleen Marlo for the difficult and delightful task of giving voice to the many "pilgrims" in this award-winning collection of short stories. Here an audio sample of Coleen's narration on Elizabeth Gilbert's website: http://www.elizabethgilbert.com/pilgrims.htm From Texan Cowboys and their Philly girls, to Hungarian musicians in Pittsburgh, Marlo rises to the task with humor and compassion.

Audible Editor Reviews

"Coleen Marlo, narrator of Pilgrims, has a silk slip of a voice that ably roams from the coarse drawl of a rodeo cowboy to the hollow whine of Babette, a bawdy Manhattan nightclub singer. Marlo passes up the easy fixes of pinning characters with cartoonish regional accents or undermining their essential dignity by assuming an absence of formal education translates into broken English. Pilgrims is both buoyant and prickly. Under Marlo’s finespun, intelligent narration, listeners will find an intuitive collaborator to Gilbert’s good flow." —Nita Rao

"Marlo bags the usual stereotypical vernacular and gives the characters carefully inflected personalities that up the zing on the dialogue. Though it is easy to assume that Gilbert heard very specific voices as she wrote-- or even lived through these tales it's certain that Marlo herself has infused the stories with some American adventures and sensibilities of her own--a direction that had the author applauding I'm sure once she heard the outcome of their collaboration. " Amazon.com "

Sourland

Stories

By Joyce Carol Oates

Named by Publishers Weekly as one of the Best Books of 2010

The 16 short stories in SOURLAND manage to fascinate and repel at the same time. Coleen Marlo masterfully tackles the works' challenges, painting vivid portraits of loss, gothic extremes, and violence with the range these diverse tales require. She employs subtle shifts of emphasis while maintaining clear storytelling personas. Individual characters come to life as Oates weaves magical situations with clever analogies, sensual observations, sexual tumult, and her signature depictions of perversions and gory details. Marlo imbues even the many secondary characters with strong variations. We hear in her voice awed and baffled children, sad adults, frightened and resigned victims, harsh criminals, and all of their innocence, despair, tension, and anger. Her vocal urgency, tempered often by tragic whimsy, scales the heights of mounting violence, then descends into the depths of sorrow. A.W. © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine [Published: MARCH 2011]

Audible Reviews

"In these 16 stories, Coleen Marlo gives voice to Joyce Carol Oates’ gothic cast of abandoned women caught in limbo and fighting to break through. The tone is set from the first few sentences of the very first tale, “Pumpkin-Head”, where a recently widowed woman muses, “There is not one person to whom you matter now. This is the crossing over.” Marlo delivers these words in a voice dripping with self-accusation — a sense of guilt and personal responsibility at being left behind pervades Sourland, and sexual violence and degradation at the hands of others is welcomed by the victims as a deserved punishment.

There is also an arbitrary cut-off point for several of the stories, as if Oates loses interest in developing a story as soon as we become interested in her slowly unfolding characters. But this is remedied by the depth and shade given to each characterisation by Marlo’s performance, and her wistful voice can be as comforting as a hushed lullaby or as cutting as a thorn bush. The peripheral characters are also made into vivid cameos, and she is adept at the male rage that buffers the women. In “Honor Code”, listen as she spits out “Don’t you turn your back on me!” and feel the tension intensify by several degrees. She also clearly differentiates between narrative voice and character dialog — the tension between the two aspects of her performance tell their own story and add another level of drama to these urgent gothic parables that leaves the listener reeling." —Dafydd Phillips

The Great Penguin Rescue

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Library Journal selected The Great Penguin Rescue as one of the Best Sci-Tech books of 2010!

Selected as a Silver Award Winner - 2011 Nautilus Book Awards

Selected as a "Must-Read" book - 2011 Massachusetts Book Awards!

When a Greek oil tanker sank off the coast of South Africa in June 2000, a massive effort was put into place to save the population of African penguins. There's urgency in Coleen Marlo's voice as she reads Boston penguin expert Dyan DeNapoli's account of the rescue effort. Marlo brings alive the frustration of cleaning thousands of oil-soaked birds. At the same time, Marlo describes the penguin personalities with delight in her voice as the author discusses the similarities between penguins and cats and the penguins’ reactions to human care. Listeners will admire the efforts of volunteers, as well as wildlife experts, and appreciate the penguins as unique, idiosyncratic animals. J.A.S. © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine [Published: FEBRUARY 2011]