My Little Donkey and Other Essays

In this elegant volume, novelist Cooley (The Archivist) reflects on her late-in-life move to Italy. After retiring from a long career as a literature professor in New York City in her mid-60s, Cooley and her husband—an Italian native—immigrated to Castigllione del Terziere, a tiny village in northern Tuscany. Cooley was immediately pulled in several directions, struggling with her new residence in an unknown country and the end of her career while staggered by the natural beauty all around her. As she incisively catalogs her cultural vertigo, she starts to broaden her lens, exploring the history of a catastrophic landslide in northeastern Italy in 1963, recalling 10 years of piano lessons she took with a troubled Russian émigré, and enumerating the difficulties of caring for her late, dementia-stricken father, who once accidentally threw away her mother’s ashes (“It’s so bad you almost have to laugh,” she writes). Though the wide angle could be a problem in lesser hands, Cooley’s wit and wisdom infuses even the most mundane subjects with wonder. Readers who’ve undergone their own rocky life transitions will be especially enchanted. Agent: Deborah Schneider, Gelfman Schneider Literary. (Nov.)