My Little Donkey - by Martha Cooley (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A collection of searching, curious, and surprising essays catalyzed by the author's move in her sixties to a small Italian village, exploring selfhood, coincidence, inheritance, and the impermanence of identity

In 2021, in her mid-sixties, Martha Cooley moved with her husband from the United States to Castiglione del Terziere, a village in northernmost Tuscany. Prompted by this relocation, the essays in My Little Donkey chronicle her encounters with people, animals, the past, and herself as she reckons with the fallout of a major life-change.

Following curiosity where it leads, Cooley delves into music and silence, the vagaries of history, the complexity of familial legacies, and the presence and power of animals in human lives. With its spirited examinations of uncanny coincidences and chance events, My Little Donkey's varied essays offer the vivid pleasures of story combined with the provocations of a writer looking behind the curtain of appearances, intent on honest assessments of what she sees and feels. Whimsical yet at the same time intellectually and emotionally bold, these essays tackle the conundrum of time's passage: how to adapt, pay attention, embrace contradiction, and enjoy the ride?

Review Quotes

Our Culture, A Most Anticipated Book of the Month

"Elegant." --Sophia Stewart, The Millions

"Cooley's wit and wisdom infuses even the most mundane subjects with wonder. Readers who've undergone their own rocky life transitions will be especially enchanted." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"These essays have a musical feel to them, at times improvisations, at times variations on a theme . . . Beauty and violence, the trivial and the profound, come together here to make us see the world anew. Essays that celebrate the sublime in the ordinary and the redemptions found in literature and family life." --Kirkus Reviews

"Cooley's elegantly written essays deserve to be read in a relaxing lounge chair with a glass of wine . . . Itinerant musings worth reading for all ages." --Booklist

"The lush, meditative essays in My Little Donkey are powered, above all, by coraggio morale, 'a strength of mind and spirit' requiring deep ethical questioning, attention to small, valuable moments, and a robust sense of humor. Martha Cooley investigates the unnerving quality of coincidence, the curious sensibilities of animals, the origins of doubt, and the mysteries of family stories so deftly and with such care, that any musty certainties we might have held about our own lives are utterly transformed." --Lia Purpura, author of On Looking

"Martha Cooley has a generous mind that manages to coax out of ordinary experience insights and layers of meaning that pass the rest of us by. Expatriate life, the human body, ageing, siblinghood, music, our connection to the animal world: these are just a handful of the subjects that weave through essays aglow with compassion, grace, and delight. My Little Donkey is a book to be awakened by and to cherish." --Michael Frank, author of One Hundred Saturdays

"Not since Natalia Ginzburg's The Little Virtues has there been a book like this. One reads with awe and surprise throughout. Martha Cooley's deft touch and mosaic method are in the service of a profoundly mature sense of life. She is the rising star of the personal essay." --Benjamin Taylor, author of Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth

About the Author

MARTHA COOLEY is the author of three novels, including the national bestseller The Archivist, Thirty-Three Swoons, and Buy Me Love, and the memoir Guesswork. Her short fiction, essays, and translations have appeared in numerous literary journals. Her co-translations of Italian fiction, poetry, and nonfiction include Antonio Tabucchi's story collection Time Ages in a Hurry and Antonio Romani's The Patient Wait of the Stones. A professor emeritus of English at Adelphi University, Cooley lives in Castiglione del Terziere, Italy.