Possibility

Patricia Vigderman is the author of The Memory Palace of Isabella Stewart Gardner (Sarabande Books, 2007), bringing the world of a century-old Boston museum and its eccentric founder into harmony with present reality. Other efforts to reconcile life’s discordant notes have led her to the ruined monuments of antiquity and its beautiful salvaged remnants, to an unexpected love affair with film, and into the endlessly unfolding mysteries of nature, language, art, and love. In 2010 she was a Literature Fellow at the Liguria Center for the Arts and Humanities in Bogliasco, Italy. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Gambier, Ohio, where she teaches in the English department at Kenyon College.

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

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 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .