Martha Cooley - Free Library Land Online - Mystery

Buy Me Love

Tue, 27 Jul 2021 19:00:26 +0300

Described by Publishers Weekly as Cooley's "sharp latest", "Cooley has a sure hand in probing the intersection of artistic ambition and money. This hopeful take is sure to move readers."

In Brooklyn, New York, in 2005, Ellen Portinari buys a lottery ticket on a whim; not long after, she realizes she's won a hundred-million-dollar jackpot. With a month to redeem the ticket, she tells no one but her alcoholic brother—a talented composer whose girlfriend has died in a terrorist attack abroad—about her preposterous good luck.
As the clock ticks, Ellen caroms from incredulity to giddiness to dread as she tries to reckon with the potential consequences of her win. She becomes unexpectedly involved with a man and boy she's met at her local gym. While she grapples with the burden of secret-keeping and the tug of a new intimacy, a Brooklyn street artist named Blair Talpa is contending with her own challenges: a missing brother, an urge to make art that will...

The Archivist

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 09:10:13 +0200

A young woman's impassioned pursuit of a sealed cache of T. S. Eliot's letters lies at the heart of this emotionally charged novel -- a story of marriage and madness, of faith and desire, of jazz-age New York and Europe in the shadow of the Holocaust. The Archivist was a word-of-mouth bestseller and one of the most jubilantly acclaimed first novels of recent years.

Guesswork

Thu, 23 Nov 2017 21:56:18 +0200

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 sun-drenched 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 to cope with our lost intimates and how to reckon with our own inevitable demise, yet she goes on, eating fresh fish from sea, drinking espresso, nursing both her memories and her dreams of happiness to come. Linking the essays is Cooley's escalating understanding of another, more painful death on the way—that of her ailing mother back in the States. Blind since Cooley's childhood, her mother's dry wit and refusal to be pitied leave them both stranded without a language to talk about her impending passing. But somehow, by the end, Cooley finds the words—each one graceful and wrenching.
Part memoir, part loving goodbye to an...

Thirty-three Swoons

Sat, 25 Nov 2006 09:10:12 +0200

- "The Archivist, Martha Cooley's first novel, was a national bestseller and a "New York Times Notable Book.- With the assurance, complexity, and depth of a work by Bulgakov, DeLillo, or Poe, Martha Cooley's extraordinary second novel is further evidence that she is one of the most gifted writers at work today.