Possibility: Essays Against Despair (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781936747542)

Possibility: Essays Against Despair attempts to translate some of life's disordered events into the orderly happiness of art. The book includes encounters with manatees, children, and snakes; with Henry Adams, Marcel Proust, and W.G. Sebald; with Texas landscape, Vertigo, and Vermeer. Adams, in Japan after his wife's death, found in the elaborate ritual of the tea ceremony and in the discomforts of a rural inn, occasions for the wit to face down grief. His letters to friends coax laughter from strangeness and loss. Like Adams, Vigderman has a stylist's passion for revelatory detail, and for the pleasure of immersion in a world. Smart, generous, and probing, her discoveries play with direct experience, exploring the interaction of life and art as "magic you can walk in and out of."

"Vigderman specializes in elliptical, epigrammatic insight that makes connectiosn that readers might not otherwise perceive.... Perhaps the most provocative essay and the emotional centerpiece is "My Depressed Person (A Monologue)," which interweaves a critical assessment of David Foster Wallace's short story "The Depressed Person" with Vigderman's own experience dealing with the depression of someone close to her, and perhaps her own as well."
--Kirkus Reviews

Author: Patricia Vigderman
ISBN-10: 1936747545
ISBN-13: 9781936747542
Publisher: Sarabande Books
Language: English
Published: 04/02/2013
Pages: 184
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.45lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.40w x 0.60d
Award: IndieFab awards - Honorable Mention

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 02/04/2013
Kirkus Reviews 01/15/2013
Foreword 02/26/2013