Launch of Martha Cooley’s newest book, Guesswork: A Reckoning with Loss.
Wednesday, April 19 2017 | 8:00 – 9:30pm | Cornelia Street Cafe NYC
Following a reading from this enchanting memoir-in-essays, the author discussed her new work, and the art of memoir-writing with author and memoirist, Benjamin Taylor.
ABOUT GUESSWORK: Having lost eight friends in ten years, Cooley retreats to a tiny medieval village in Italy with her husband to recover from la strage, or “the massacre.” There, in this sundrenched paradise where bumblebees nest in the ancient cemetery and stray cats curl up on her bed, she examines what we all must confront one day, mortality. How do we grieve? How do we go on drinking our morning coffee, loving our life partners, stumbling though a world of such confusing, exquisite beauty?
Part memoir, part loving goodbye to an unconventional parent, Guesswork transforms a year in a pastoral hill town into a fierce examination of life, love, death, and, ultimately, release.
https://books.catapult.co/
MARTHA COOLEY is the author of the national bestseller The Archivist and ThirtyThree Swoons. The Archivist was a New York Times Notable Book and a New and Noteworthy paperback. Cooley is currently a contributing editor at A Public Space. Her cotranslations of Italian fiction and poetry include Antonio Tabucchi’s story collection Time Ages in a Hurry. A professor of English at Adelphi University, Cooley divides her time between Queens, New York, and Castiglione del Terziere, Italy. Her American cat, Zora, is named after one of the cities in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, and their Italian cat, Tristana, is named after the medieval knight.
BENJAMIN TAYLOR is the author of a book of essays, Into the Open, and two novels, Tales Out of School, winner of the Harold Ribalow Prize, and The Book of Getting Even, a 2009 Barnes & Noble Discover Award winner, a 2008 Los Angeles Times Favorite Book of the Year, and a Ferro-Grumley Prize Finalist. In 2009, The Book of Getting Even appeared as El Libro de la Venganza in Spain, where it was named a best book of the year by El Pais. In 2010, Viking Press released Saul Bellow: Letters, followed in Spring 2015 by Bellow’s There Is Simply Too Much to Think About, both edited by Taylor. Naples Declared: A Walk Around the Bay, a travel memoir from Marian Wood Books, was released in hardcover in 2012 and named a Best Book of 2012 by The New Yorker.