Buy Me Love

by Martha Cooley

Overview

Described by Publishers Weekly as Cooley's "sharp latest", "Cooley has a sure hand in probing the intersection of artistic ambition and money. This hopeful take is sure to move readers."

In Brooklyn, New York, in 2005, Ellen Portinari buys a lottery ticket on a whim; not long after, she realizes she’s won a hundred-million-dollar jackpot. With a month to redeem the ticket, she tells no one but her alcoholic brother—a talented composer whose girlfriend has died in a terrorist attack abroad—about her preposterous good luck.

As the clock ticks, Ellen caroms from incredulity to giddiness to dread as she tries to reckon with the potential consequences of her win. She becomes unexpectedly involved with a man and boy she’s met at her local gym. While she grapples with the burden of secret-keeping and the tug of a new intimacy, a Brooklyn street artist named Blair Talpa is contending with her own challenges: a missing brother, an urge to make art that will “derange orbits,” and a lack of money.

En route to redeem the lottery ticket, Ellen finds her prospects entwining by chance with Blair’s—which allows Ellen to reimagine luck’s relation to loss, and the reader to revel in surprise.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597091206
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	06/01/2021
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Martha Cooley is the author of two novels—The Archivist, a national bestseller also published in a dozen foreign markets, and Thirty-Three Swoons—and a memoir, Guesswork. She co-translated Antonio Tabucchi’s story collection Time Ages in a Hurry. Her essays, short fiction, and co-translations have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books and numerous leading literary journals. She directs the MFA in Creative Writing at Adelphi University, where she is a Professor of English. Prior to Adelphi, she taught for fifteen years in the Bennington Writing Seminars. She lives in Forest Hills (Queens), New York, and Castiglione del Terziere, Italy.

Interviews

"With this novel I wanted to make a story to whose coincidences the reader will assent even when they seem unlikely. Put differently, I wanted the reader to say, “jeez, what?!—but still, you know, I believe it…” We’re incredulous in the face of all that’s “stranger than fiction,” yet in our lives we recognize that coincidences are altogether real and inescapable. And we take pleasure in this very strangeness." -  Martha Cooley, The Brooklyn Rail

Editorial Reviews

04/26/2021

Cooley (The Archivist) examines the unexpected aftermath of a lottery win in her sharp latest. Ellen Portinari is a 52-year-old freelance editor, aspiring poet, and happily single woman living in New York City. After forgetting she’d bought a lottery ticket, she learns she holds the winning $100 million ticket, and the potential windfall causes her to reassess her life. She thinks about her parents—a gin-soaked mother and a closeted, flamboyant star-baritone father—and gets back in touch with her genius-composer brother who is dealing with a nearly unbearable grief over the death of his girlfriend. Ellen knows the money will have a huge impact on her relationships with her family, and wonders how it will change her poetic aspirations and her romantic prospects. Meanwhile, recent art-school graduate Blair is “a boy in a girl’s body” who creates political public art to exorcise her demons and needs funding for her next project. Though unknown to one another, Ellen and Blair share an unspoken desire to connect through expression and, in a predictable twist, their coincidental meeting sparks a potentially life-changing act of creative destruction. While some of the developments come across as implausible, Cooley has a sure hand in probing the intersection of artistic ambition and money. This hopeful take is sure to move readers. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"Buy Me Love is a terrific novel about the eternal confusions of money and our beloved notions of free will—as they play out for one woman with a lottery ticket. It has a superbly believable romance, crooked family histories, and a sneaky double plot. Readers drawn in by its sharpness and originality will find themselves richly rewarded by its striking turns." —Joan Silber, author of Improvement

"Money—its seductive force, the love of it, its weird immaterial nature, the good it can do, and the risk that having it could obliterate who you are—is everyone’s suave adversary in Martha Cooley’s penetrating novel. She has drawn each of these characters with striking uniqueness. They could all use a bit more money. But it’s the possibility of suddenly having a lot more that fills the story with such danger and hope. If you got everything you wanted, would you still want it? And would you still be you?" —Salvatore Scibona, author of The Volunteer

"What a whip-smart, tender, and funny novel dealing with luck, fate, relationships, the whole deal! So enjoyable and wonderfully, wonderfully written! I can see this book appealing to so many types of readers!"—Mark Haber, Bezos Books in Houston, TX

From the Publisher

01/01/2021

Author of the much-loved The Archivist, Cooley here gives Ellen Portinari a winning lottery ticket in 2005 New York and a month to redeem it. But Ellen worries about the consequences of staking her claim, even as she gets tangled up with a troubled Brooklyn street artist and a man and boy she meets at the gym.

Library Journal