{"product_id":"gallery-of-clouds-rachel-eisendrath-9781681375434","title":"Gallery of Clouds","description":"\u003cb\u003eA personal and critical work that celebrates the pleasure of books and reading.\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eLargely unknown to readers today, Sir Philip Sidney's sixteenth-century pastoral romance \u003ci\u003eArcadia\u003c\/i\u003e was long considered one of the finest works of prose fiction in the English language. Shakespeare borrowed an episode from it for \u003ci\u003eKing Lear\u003c\/i\u003e; Virginia Woolf saw it as \"some luminous globe\" wherein \"all the seeds of English fiction lie latent.\" In \u003ci\u003eGallery of Clouds\u003c\/i\u003e, the Renaissance scholar Rachel Eisendrath has written an extraordinary homage to \u003ci\u003eArcadia\u003c\/i\u003e in the form of a book-length essay divided into passing clouds: \"The clouds in my Arcadia, the one I found and the one I made, hold light and color. They take on the forms of other things: a cat, the sea, my grandmother, the gesture of a teacher I loved, a friend, a girlfriend, a ship at sail, my mother. These clouds stay still only as long as I look at them, and then they change.\" \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ci\u003eGallery of Clouds\u003c\/i\u003e opens in New York City with a dream, or a vision, of meeting Virginia Woolf in the afterlife. Eisendrath holds out her manuscript--an infinite moment passes--and Woolf takes it and begins to read. From here, in this act of magical reading, the book scrolls out in a series of reflective pieces linked through metaphors and ideas. Golden threadlines tie each part to the next: a rupture of time in a Pisanello painting; Montaigne's practice of revision in his essays; a segue through Vivian Gordon Harsh, the first African American head librarian in the Chicago public library system; a brief history of prose style; a meditation on the active versus the contemplative life; the story of Sarapion, a fifth-century monk; the persistence of the pastoral; image-making and thought; reading Willa Cather to her grandmother in her Chicago apartment; the deviations of Walter Benjamin's \"scholarly romance,\" \u003ci\u003eThe Arcades Project\u003c\/i\u003e. Eisendrath's wondrously woven hybrid work extols the materiality of reading, its pleasures and delights, with wild leaps and abounding grace.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Rachel Eisendrath\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-10:\u003c\/b\u003e 1681375435\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-13:\u003c\/b\u003e 9781681375434\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e New York Review of Books\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/b\u003e English\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 05\/11\/2021\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 160\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFormat:\u003c\/b\u003e Hardcover\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWeight:\u003c\/b\u003e 0.55lbs\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSize:\u003c\/b\u003e 10.00h x 6.40w x 0.40d\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eReview Citation(s): \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e 02\/01\/2021\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e 02\/15\/2021","brand":"Rachel Eisendrath","offers":[{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":44051494600959,"sku":"9781681375434","price":19.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0662\/2982\/9887\/files\/img_f6491ffb-9602-409e-bac6-7e03dfb59354.jpg?v=1685013438","url":"https:\/\/www.whiterainbookhouse.com\/products\/gallery-of-clouds-rachel-eisendrath-9781681375434","provider":"WR Book House","version":"1.0","type":"link"}