Possibility translates life's disordered events into the orderly happiness of art. Subjects include manatees, Henry Adams, Texas, Proust, and Vertigo.

"Reading Patricia Vigderman is like attending an ideal dinner party, where everyone has read your favorite books. Her essays wind particular passages of Proust, or George Eliot, or W.G. Sebald around personal moments; David Foster Wallace's story 'The Depressed Person' is threaded throughout an essay about her own relationship with a loved one's serious depression. Vigderman's responses are fresh and original and her sounding of our collective literary treasures are likely to send you back to read them again, now overlaid with her embroidery."—Mona SimpsonIn this accessible collection of essays, Patricia Vigderman attempts to translate some of life's disordered events into the orderly happiness of art. She encounters manatees, children, and snakes; with Henry Adams, Marcel Proust, and W.G. Sebald; with Texas landscape, Vertigo, and Johannes 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."Patricia Vigderman's work has appeared in The Nation, The New York Times, Georgia Review, Raritan, and others. She was a Literature Fellow at the Liguria Center for the Arts and Humanities in Italy and teaches at Kenyon College.

Possibility: Essays Against DespairIntroduction: Seeing Double . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I: Internal Conversations1. The Task of the Translator . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. A Writer’s Harvest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. Sebald in Starbucks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4. Eye Shadows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5. Monkey Mind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6. Henry Adams in Japan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . II: The Measure of Grief7. Genealogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8. Dixie Diary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9. The Other Side . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10. My Depressed Person . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11. Not Exactly Kaddish . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12. Grace Paley Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . III: At Liberty13. Eggs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14. Tapping Back . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15. What It’s Like in Ohio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16. Manatees . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17. By the Pond . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18. Oxherding in the Chisos Mountains . . . . . . . . . IV: Particular Artifice19. Boxes in Texas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20. Inventing Cinema . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21. Possibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .