{"product_id":"gallery-of-clouds-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\u003eBinding Type:\u003c\/b\u003e Hardcover\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e New York Review of Books\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 05\/11\/2021\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN:\u003c\/b\u003e 9781681375434\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 160","brand":"Rachel Eisendrath","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39715183132853,"sku":"9781681375434","price":16.96,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0473\/0804\/6492\/products\/img_446e6c85-4194-43ad-92c6-5432bbb277c7.jpg?v=1618292284","url":"https:\/\/pastforward.org\/products\/gallery-of-clouds-9781681375434","provider":"Past Forward","version":"1.0","type":"link"}