- A novel by Pati Hill
- Edited by Ana Baliza and Baptiste Pinteaux
- Graphic design by Ana Baliza based on the original edition by Pati Hill
- Juin 2025, English, Literature
- 192 pp., 15.5 × 19.5 cm, softcover
- Edition of 1000
- ISBN 978-2-9576611-5-2
- This book is a faithful facsimile of the first edition of the book, published in 1976 by Alice James Books.This publication has been supported by the Centre national des arts plastiques.
Impossible Dreams was Pati Hill’s last published novel, released in 1976 after it was partially published two years earlier in the Carolina Quarterly under the title “An Angry French Housewife.” Hill tells the story of Geneviève, a middle-aged woman whose life is turned upside down when she unexpectedly falls in love with her neighbor, Dolly. Mixing anecdotes with existential thoughts, the novel describes the gradual disruption of the heroine’s daily life. Almost every chapter (the length of which varies from a single sentence to no more than three pages) is accompanied by a xerograph of a photograph, selected by Hill with permission from its maker. The resulting combination of text and image constitutes her most ambitious attempt to produce a work in which “the two elements fuse to become something other than either.”
This novel is one of the most incisive examples of Hill’s writing—dry and impartial, yet managing to capture the contradictory feelings of her characters. In a letter addressed to the photographer Eva Rubinstein asking for reproduction rights, she writes: “My book is about a woman with a little girl and a husband who falls in love with a woman and a little girl and a husband and loses them all, just like in your mirror. It doesn’t sound very cheerful but it is mainly funny.”
This summer, Daisy will release a facsimile of the out-of-print work that, after almost 50 years since its initial publication, has become a coveted collector’s item.
Praise for Impossible Dreams
Pati Hill is always doing extraordinary things, quite unlike anything anyone else is doing, full of wit and ingenuity and imagination. Impossible Dreams combines all of these….
George Plimpton, writer and founding editor of The Paris Review.
Although Impossible Dreams is called ‘‘a novel,’’ I regard this work as an artists’ book whose images possess the grainy quality of memory.
Martha Wilson, performance artist and founding director, Franklin Furnace.
Impossible Dreams charmed me with its droll and irreverent tone when it was first published. Hill’s use of embedded photographs was unexpected and transgressive for its me. Brilliant!
Anne Turyn, photographer, educator and founding editor, Top Stories.
PATI HILL (1921–2014) was born in Ashland, Kentucky and died in Sens, France. Her practice as a writer—which flourished between 1951 and 1962—was irrevocably transformed in the early 1970s by her encounter with a photocopier, turning her into a producer of pictures, illustrated texts and exhibitions.
Her work has recently been shown in solo exhibitions at Printed Matter (New York), Arcadia University (Glenside, PA), Essex Street (New York), Air de Paris (Romainville), Treize (Paris), Kunstverein (Munich), Kunsthalle (Zurich) and Ampersand (Lisbon).
The Pati Hill Collection, transferred to Arcadia University in 2017, consists of all of her manuscripts dating from 1932, extensive correspondence and documentation, and four decades of artistic production. Most of Hill’s writings are still out of print and only a few have recently been republished.
