Possibility
Essays Against Despair
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Sarabande Books, Incorporated
Published:16th May '13
Currently unavailable, our supplier has not provided us a restock date
$3000 marketing and publicity budget Tour of Ohio and Indiana colleges Push for academic course adoptions in creative writing programs Features in newsletter and catalog Digital postcard sent to all Vigderman and Sarabande contacts Advertising in AWP Chronicle, Boston Review, Poets & Writers, Fourth Genre, Creative Nonfiction Social Media push with downloadable essays, especially the shorter pieces "Credit card" with link to downloadable essays and title information
Possibility translates life's disordered events into the orderly happiness of art. Subjects include manatees, Henry Adams, Texas, Proust, and Vertigo.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
"Though the book's title might resemble that of a self-help book, the essays in Vigderman's collection dwell not on despair, but on the project of translating chaotic experience into art or memory.... She is enthusiastic about beautiful language and new words--and her writing, lyrical and graceful, shows it." --Publishers Weekly "Vigderman specializes in elliptical, epigrammatic insight that makes connections that readers might not otherwise perceive. Most of the essays (many of them little longer than a page or two) were published independently, and all can stand on their own, but the author has provided a conceptual framework and thread of continuity as she groups them into four parts, moving from Internal Conversations” to The Measure of Grief ” in the opening and two most compelling sections.... Frequent illumination within the density of compression, as the writer challenges readers to determine what they’re thinking and feeling about what she’s thinking and feeling." --Kirkus Reviews
"Though the book's title might resemble that of a self-help book, the essays in Vigderman's collection dwell not on despair, but on the project of translating chaotic experience into art or memory.... She is enthusiastic about beautiful language and new words--and her writing, lyrical and graceful, shows it." --Publishers Weekly "Vigderman specializes in elliptical, epigrammatic insight that makes connections that readers might not otherwise perceive. Most of the essays (many of them little longer than a page or two) were published independently, and all can stand on their own, but the author has provided a conceptual framework and thread of continuity as she groups them into four parts, moving from “Internal Conversations” to “The Measure of Grief ” in the opening and two most compelling sections.... Frequent illumination within the density of compression, as the writer challenges readers to determine what they’re thinking and feeling about what she’s thinking and feeling." --Kirkus Reviews
- Commended for IndieFab awards (Essays) 2013
ISBN: 9781936747542
Dimensions: 196mm x 133mm x 15mm
Weight: 198g
184 pages