Guesswork: A Reckoning with Loss [Idioma Inglés] - Tapa blanda

Praise for Guesswork

"[A] splendid and subtle memoir in essays" --The New York Times Book Review

"As delightful and multi-faceted as the tiny medieval Italian village Cooley spent a year in, Guesswork grapples with weighty ideas of mortality and creativity, as well as personal and cultural legacies. Cooley deftly captures the local characters, both human and animal, as well as the cultural and linguistic state of inbetweenness she and her Italian husband exist in. A surprising, beautiful, and moving memoir in essays." --Rob Spillman

"Beauty and Sadness, the title of Kawabata's novel, could equally fit Martha Cooley's deeply felt, lyrically precise memoir. Such exquisite descriptions and pointed observations pour forth from this writer, gifted with enviable cultivation and sensibility." --Phillip Lopate

"In her new memoir, Guesswork, Martha Cooley explores the issues of loss and grief. With eloquence and tenderness, using as lenses Italy, the deaths of friends, and the nature of love and responsibility toward aging parents, she has written a lovely, thoughtful book, full of wisdom and caritas." --Roxana Robinson

"Martha Cooley has a natural instinct for the introspective essay. She creates a subtle pulse of memory and reflection, combining a lyric warmth of engagement with a classicist's restraint of presentation. The people come alive, and the place--Italy--is vivid in the moment even as it is held fast in the long lens of time." --Sven Birkerts, Author of Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age

Praise for The Archivist

National Bestseller

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

"Martha Cooley has given us something valuable and rare--a thoughtful and well-written first novel, suffused with intellectual and moral integrity.... Cooley is an accomplished stylist--there's scarcely a graceless or unintelligent sentence in the book--and a subtle chronicler of the interior life.... The Archivist treats serious questions in a humane and passionate manner, and leaves one thinking about these questions long after one has read the last page." --New York Times Book Review

"Engrossing... rarely has a novel centering on the life of the mind felt so passionate." --Entertainment Weekly

"Compelling... Cooley's suave plotting displays many surprises, and her work exhibits that rarest of literary qualities nowadays, authentic moral resonance." --Boston Globe

"A literary detective story... beautifully paced and gripping.... An impressive debut." --The Observer (London)

"It is rare and gratifying to read a novel about people who take literature seriously, who practically live and die by books... The Archivist is a memorable achievement." --Washington Post Book World

"The Archivist is many things: a speculative academic mystery; a meditation on obsession; a study of madness; a soliloquy to solitude. Cooley weaves all these genres together with nary a dropped stitch." --Hungry Mind Review

"An engrossing, ambitious debut about love, art, and insanity.... Cooley brilliantly employs Eliot's poetry and troubled biography as a window into Matt's tragic past." --Entertainment Weekly

"A solid accomplishment.... Martha Cooley has looked back in time with a steady, penetrating gaze... Fans of literary fiction will want to make the acquaintance of the talented Ms. Cooley." --New York Observer

"Sublime... supremely satisfying... As Cooley's characters relate to Eliot's verse, it comes alive, igniting their passion and touching their troubled souls." --Charleston City Paper

"An imaginative and compassionate novel... that probes complex questions--about love, religious faith, and the conflict between a writer's desire for privacy and the reader's hunger for revelations." --Christian Science Monitor

"Marvelous.... The Archivist is an intellectual journey.... Ping, ping, ping, the ideas bang off each other; not irony, exactly, just images set against others, things that seem contradictory, yet between them there is a spark that leaves behind some certain truth. It's a hard thing to accomplish, unless you're T.S. Eliot--or Martha Cooley." --Hartford Courant

"A marvelously old-fashioned novel... Cooley handles her intricately structured multiple stories with calm assurance and the quiet passion of a born lyricist." --LA Weekly

"Remarkable.... Though Cooley has twinned the tales of poets and madness, Christians and Jews, caretakers and gatekeepers and betrayers, the stories never appeared contrived, only very, very, human." --St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"It's a rare and special treat to discover a debut work as impressive as The Archivist. A splendid work of fiction, rich with character and conflict, masterfully blending past and present." --Fort Worth Star Telegram

"A tale of astonishing insight... brilliant and unsettling." --Reform Judaism

"In this, her sumptuous first novel, Martha Cooley weaves together an elaborate cloth of twentieth-century history... in order to probe the shifting disposition and configuration of obsession, memory, and madness. --Houston Chronicle

"A provocative, carefully paced, intelligent story of love and the pathology of repression... Most novelists might publish a shelf full of books before approaching the eloquence and command found in The Archivist." --Portland Oregonian

Praise for Thirty-Three Swoons

"Thirty-Three Swoons tells a deeply satisfying story... This is a book of sudden unleashing, resonant with wisdom and passion, whose central characters grow wiser and more passionate before our eyes." --San Francisco Chronicle

"Nocturnal events prod Camilla to come clean with her intimates, whose fierce loyalty to our prickly and recalcitrant heroine is rendered believable by Cooley's assured yet unassuming eloquence.... Motifs of artful disguise and neglectful or surrogate parentage intersect like nested Russian dolls as these curiously joined lives play out." --Kirkus Reviews

"Like her first novel, The Archivist, Martha Cooley's Thirty-Three Swoons fuses history with a contemporary story that builds in suspense as family memories surface and revelations emerge." --Boston Globe

"Martha Cooley has mastered the art of folding historical figures into her fiction, without making the final product feel gimmicky... Her language throughout is haunting... Her descriptive powers are spellbinding." --NPR's Fresh Air

"Thirty-Three Swoons is ingenious and instructive, and Ms. Cooley skillfully juggles her brilliant scheme." --Wall Street Journal

"It's hard to say that a book as intelligent as Thirty-Three Swoons is a lot of fun to read, but it is a lot of fun. --NPR

"Thirty-Three Swoons exquisitely explores, among many other things, the most neglected of all the senses, the olfactory, even more thoroughly than Proust does. Like a matryoshka doll, Martha Cooley's narrative contains many aspects: the American story of shopkeeping and theater contains a Russian story, which contains a Parisian story which contains another American story with Russian dreams, all told in beautifully surprising ways. It is a highly intoxicating and sensual unwrapping experience--a gift to us, from a brilliant storyteller." --Josip Novakovich, author of April Fool's Day

"Open Thirty-Three Swoons and surrender to its heady spell. With the deft, sensual skill of the world-class perfumist she portrays, Martha Cooley concocts her own potent mix of psychological realism and matter-of-fact magic. I loved watching her witty and resilient heroine learn 'the hard beauty of letting go.' Thirty-three cheers for this haunted and haunting novel!" --Elizabeth Searle, author of A Four-Sided Bed

"Lively and fresh. An increasingly fraught familial puzzle... makes for some fast-turning pages." --Bookforum

"After reading Martha Cooley's wonderful second novel, I am convinced that she is a very significant new writer on the American and world scene. With Thirty-Three Swoons, she has established herself splendidly." --Arnost Lustig, author of A Prayer for Katerina Horovitz Ova

"In these lyrical essays, Cooley brings us along vicariously to feel time loosen its grip, allowing a renewing self to emerge." --BBC.com