Martha is one of the recipients of the 2017 O. Henry Prize for her short story “Mercedes Benz.” This year’s volume of the O. Henry Prize Stories can be seen here with additional information about the prize and its recipients.
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The Archivist–Martha’s debut novel–has been included in the New York Times summer 2017 reading suggestions.
The moving and beautifully poised text is described as “…a layered literary novel about love, grief, mental illness and religion with a middle section told in diary form.”
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Martha will be reading from Guesswork: A Reckoning With Loss, in the coming weeks. Published by Catapult, this memoir-in-essays is her first work of nonfiction.
In an incisive review of Martha’s memoir in the New York Times Book Review, Meghan Daum traces the body through the forces and relations of loss and decay that haunt Guesswork:
In “Guesswork,” the body is both canvas and carapace, both superficial construct and, for better or worse, the whole damn point. Vacationing on the island of Giglio in the Tyrrhenian Sea, Cooley and her husband find themselves in the literal and figurative shadow of the Costa Concordia, the giant cruise ship that struck a rock and capsized earlier that year, leaving 32 dead and two still missing. The boat has remained partly submerged in the water, a body that can be neither exhumed nor buried.
Guesswork, reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, has been described as a “precisely rendered memoir” traversing mortal sorrow and vivacious celebration:
By the end of the couple’s stay, Prof. Cooley has learned to live more comfortably with the memories of lost friends whose presence she still feels, and has incorporated the knowledge that her parents’ voices will similarly continue to resonate within her.
A review on Shelf Awareness reads,
Each person’s experience of profound loss is different. Novelist Martha Cooley (The Archivist) has chosen to describe hers in Guessswork: A Reckoning with Loss, a collection of lyrical personal essays. The 16 shimmering pieces pay homage to a group of recently departed friends while affirming, with a poet’s sensibility, life’s fragile beauty as Cooley experienced it in a sabbatical year she and her husband spent in a tiny Italian town.
Matt Seidel offers intimate and personal insights in his review of Guesswork, “Sun, Hum, and Shade,” published in the LARB:
Guesswork is the record of her own attempt to slow down, take stock, act purposefully. It is a touching work, both in the emotional sense but also in Cooley’s intense focus on tactility, specifically how touch communicates more than language — especially in a foreign country — and also sight.
In a review published on Women’s Memoirs, Lanie Tankard discusses the delicate balance of emotional strain and nostalgic musing woven together in Martha’s memoir,
She upends grief, dissecting it from various angles. What is it anyway? Remorse? Heartache? Intense sorrow? Anguish? She employs all the standard guesswork methods—conjecture, presumption, deduction, reasoning, and speculation— to calculate her position. Her emotionally expressive writing utilizes an appropriate degree of detachment to avoid becoming maudlin as she muses.
Lorraine Berry’s review, “How to Put Yourself Back Together: A Literary Guide,” reads Martha’s memoir alongside other women authors whose texts confront the transformative power of woundedness as it finds material translation in movement–geographic, corporeal, and otherwise:
Of course, geographic cures don’t often work the way we hope they will. And Cooley does a lovely job of weaving together her observations of this place she has landed, and the ways in which grief still demands an accounting from us no matter where we may run to in order to try to escape.
An excerpt from Guesswork has been published on Literary Hub.
Listen to an interview with Martha discussing her text with Tom Williams on Utah Public Radio.
You can order Guesswork here.
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Wednesday, April 5
At PEN AND BRUSH with two other writers—poet Gwen North Reiss and essayist/memoirist Melissa Febos—at 7 pm., at 29 E. 22nd Street.
Wednesday, April 19
An “official” book launch, hosted by Adelphi University’s MFA program, at Cornelia Street Cafe, 29 Cornelia Street, 8 pm. In conversation with Benjamin Taylor, whose memoir The Hue and Cry at Our House is coming out in May.
Saturday, May 6
At Open Book in Elkins Park (outside Philadelphia) at 2 pm.
Wednesday, May 10
Reading/panel about loss with two other authors—Charles Bock and Max Winter—moderated by Mira Jacob, at the Center for Fiction, 17 E. 47th Street, at 7 pm.
Wednesday, May 24
At Newtonville Books, 10 Langely Road in Newtonville Centre, MA—with Douglas Bauer, author of What Happens Next, a memoir in essays.
Thursday, June 1
Book signing at 11am during the annual Book Expo at the Javits Convention Center in NYC. Martha will be located at the Catapult booth (#2546).
Sunday, June 4
“The Facts of Life: Love, Loss, What Comes Next.” Panel Discussion from 10 am to 11:15 am at the Bay Area Book Festival with John W. Evans and Marissa Moss, moderated by Elizabeth Farnsworth.
Monday, June 5
Conversation with writer Anne Germanacos at Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 Ninth Ave., San Francisco at 7:30 pm.
Martha Cooley is a novelist and author of short fiction, essays, and poetry whose work has appeared in leading literary journals. Her first novel, The Archivist, was a national best-seller published in a dozen foreign markets, and her second, Thirty-Three Swoons, was also published in Italian.
Martha lives in two places—New York and Italy—and in two languages, English and Italian. She is a Professor of English at Adelphi University, where she’s taught undergraduate and graduate (MFA) students since 2005. She served for fifteen years on the core faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars. In Italy, Martha has led fiction workshops in Cortona, Siena, and Certaldo, and she gives an annual lecture at the British Council in Milan. In 2015, she published (with her co-translator) a translation of the last collection of short stories by Antonio Tabucchi, Time Ages in a Hurry.
Martha is an active member of PEN American Center, where she serves on the Membership Committee and is particularly involved in Advocate Membership and MFA student engagement.
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