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�The essays in Vigderman�s collection dwell not on despair, but on the project of translating chaotic experience into art or memory . . . Lyrical and graceful� (Publishers Weekly). In 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.� �In reading Vigderman�s collection, for the space of the journey, we are able to step outside ourselves, or a least engage her subjects�a small town in Texas, Proust, W.G. Sebald, and yes, manatees�to find some perspective on what it is to be human.� �The Iowa Review �It is to this author�s credit that as her essays skip tracks, locating new routes without trying to prove their points, I was never in a hurry for the motion to end.� �The Rumpus �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 Simpson, author of A Regular Guy (less)

�The essays in Vigderman�s collection dwell not on despair, but on the project of translating chaotic experience into art or memory . . . Lyrical and graceful� (Publishers Weekly). In this accessible collection of essays, Patricia Vigderman (…more)