“Not since Natalia Ginzburg”s Le piccole virtu has there been a book like this. One reads with awe and surprise throughout. 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
My Little Donkey and Other Essays
A collection of curious and surprising essays that chronicle the author’s encounters with people, animals, the past, and herself, sparked by a move to a small Italian village after a lifetime in New York City In 2021, Martha Cooley left her teaching job and longtime apartment in New York City and moved with her husband to Castiglione del Terziere, a tiny village in northernmost Tuscany. The essays in My Little Donkey are reckonings with the fallout of this major life change and what it says about destiny, inheritance, and the impermanence of identity.
Following curiosity where it leads, Cooley delves into music and silence, the vagaries of history, the complexity of familial legacy, 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 relish the ride.
