Catapult

In 2021, in her mid-sixties, Martha Cooley moved with her husband from the United States to Castiglione del Terziere, a village in northernmost Tuscany. Prompted by this relocation, the essays in My Little Donkey chronicle her encounters with people, animals, the past, and herself as she reckons with the fallout of a major life-change. Following curiosity where it leads, Cooley delves into music and silence, the vagaries of history, the complexity of familial legacies, 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 enjoy the ride?

Twice Born opens with the death of Hester''s father, Justin Kaplan, known for his award-winning biographies of Mark Twain and Walt Whitman. Despite his relatively prolific output, Justin rarely wrote, or said, much about himself-even to his daughter. Standing at his open casket, Hester has the realisation that while alive, her father never looked her in the eyes. Hester takes on the challenge of piecing together as intimate a biography of her own father as possible, comparing his story to the lives of his biographical subjects and dissecting the various personas he presents to the world-from which the name ''dad,'' ''daddy,'' or even ''father'' is conspicuously and painfully absent. Parallel to Justin''s story runs Hester''s own journey of development as a writer and a thinker, which begins in the shadow of not only her talented father, but also her novelist mother, and the fiercely protective union the two of them had built, often to the exclusion of their own children. In sensitive, intimate writing, Kaplan paints a rich picture of the twentieth century literary world that she grew up in, all while reflecting on the deceptive nature of memory, the loneliness of creative pursuits, and the dovetailing paradoxes of biographical and autobiographical writing.

Husband and wife Bohumil and Bohumila, together with their son, move from Prague to a remote village with the hopes of salvaging their marriage. In the searing summer heat, they try to fit in with the villagers, only to be met with hostile stares and evasive lies. Each night, the couple hears what they suspect to be a large animal wandering around their cottage - an impression that oddly corresponds to the mysterious flyers found at the local watering hole regarding a wolfen fairytale. As inexplicable coincidences begin piling up, it''s clear something sinister is afoot. After a drunken night out, Bohumil and Bohumila come home to find the house empty: their son is gone. After three days of searching, they find the villagers in festive costumes gathered outside their cottage. Is it a bizarre game, or some perverse, folkloric ritual? Are Bohumil and Bohumila in danger? And what has happened to their son? A dark social tale that slides inexorably towards psychological horror, Playing Wolf is a modern ballad of human destiny and discovering the animal in each of us.

In the early days of the pandemic, Peter Mendelsund and his family traveled up to a secluded New Hampshire farmhouse to weather the chaos. There began his journey through a crippling and seemingly intractable depression - which differed in degree but not in kind from episodes that have recurred periodically throughout his life - that brought him to the brink of suicide. Relief came from an unlikely source: painting, something Peter had never contemplated doing before. And yet it became the thing that may very well have saved his life. Bleakly funny, profoundly moving, and - against all odds - truly inspiring, Exhibitionist is not just an account of a mind thinking through its own suffering in real-time, and of the author''s reckoning with his father''s tortured legacy; it''s also the story of the birth of an artist, and a portrait of an artist at work.

Growing up in Yakima, Washington, Noe Alvarez never knew his grandfather. Stories swirled around this mythologized, larger-than-life figure: That he had abandoned his family, and had possibly done something awful that put a curse on his descendants. About his grandfather, young Noe was sure of only one thing: That he had played the accordion. Now an adult, reckoning with the legacy of silence surrounding his family''s migration from Mexico, Alvarez resolves both to take up the instrument and to journey into Mexico to discover the grandfather he never knew. Alvarez travels across the US with his accordion, meeting makers and players in cities that range from San Antonio to Boston. He uncovers the story of an instrument that''s been central to classic American genres, but also played a critical role in indigenous Mexican history. Like the accordion itself, Alvarez feels trapped between his roots in Mexico and the U.S. As he tries to make sense of his place in the world - as a father, a son, a musician - he gets closer to uncovering the mystery of his origins.

Tansy and her husband Guy are the newest arrivals in Bellinas, a lush oasis tucked into the coast of northern California where a reclusive, creative community is beginning to take shape. Helmed by Guy''s cousin Mia, a famous model-turned-wellness-luminary, and her tech mogul husband, the group renounces the outside world in pursuit of purity, fashioning their own rules about what to eat and how to live. Everything seems perfect in Bellinas: food is abundant, flowers are always in bloom, and nearby wildfires leave the town remarkably unscathed. While Guy is happy in their new lives, Tansy becomes more and more suspicious of the community and increasingly desperate to save her already-fragile marriage. And as lonely women have throughout the ages, she wants to believe in what may only be a beautiful lie. The Witches of Bellinas unfolds as a confession from Tansy, filled with anguish over the life, and sense of self, she''s surrendered in her desperation to belong. In J. Nicole Jones''s clever reimagining of cult power and groupthink, the question isn''t why join, but rather, what happens when you understand the danger, but can''t conceive of a way out?

One Thanksgiving afternoon at his grandparents'' house, Jordan Salama discovers a large binder stuffed with yellowing papers and old photographs - a five-hundred-year wandering history of his Arab-Jewish family, from Moorish Spain to Ottoman Syria to Argentina and beyond. One story in particular captures his attention: that of his great-grandfather, a Syria-born, Arabic-speaking Jewish immigrant to Argentina who in the 1920s worked as a traveling salesman in the Andes - and may have left behind forgotten descendants along the way. Encouraged by his grandfather, Jordan goes in search of these ''Lost Salamas,'' traveling more than a thousand miles up the spine of South America''s greatest mountain range. Combining travelog, history, memoir, and reportage, Stranger in the Desert transports readers from the lonely plains of Patagonia to the breath-taking altiplano of the high Andes; from the old Jewish quarter of Damascus to today''s vibrant neighbourhoods of Buenos Aires. It is also a fervent journey of self-discovery as Salama grapples with his own Jewish, Arab, and Latin American identities, interrogating the stories families tell themselves, and to what end.

On a Greek island rich with ancient beauty, a lonely woman in her thirties upends the relationship between a mother and her teenage daughter. Lust and admiration for Helena, a chic older artist, brings Antiquity''s unnamed narrator to Ermoupoli, where Helena''s daughter, Olga, seems at first like an obstacle and a nuisance. But the unpredictable forces of ego and desire take over, leading our narrator down a more dangerous path, and causing the roles of lover and beloved, child and adult, stranger and intimate to become distorted. As the months go by, the fragile web connecting the three women nears rupture, and the ominous consequences of their entanglement loom just beyond a summer that must end. With echoes of Death in Venice, Call Me by Your Name, and The Lover, but wholly original and contemporary, Antiquity probes the depths of memory, beauty, morality, and the narratives that arrange our experience of the world.