{"product_id":"gallery-of-clouds-by-rachel-eisendrath","title":"Gallery of Clouds by Rachel Eisendrath","description":"\u003cp\u003eFrom New York Review of Books:\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cmain id=\"MainContent\" class=\"content-for-layout focus-none\" role=\"main\" tabindex=\"-1\"\u003e\n\u003csection id=\"shopify-section-template--16156684288168__main\" class=\"shopify-section section\"\u003e\n\u003csection id=\"MainProduct-template--16156684288168__main\" class=\"page-width section-template--16156684288168__main-padding\" data-section=\"template--16156684288168__main\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"product product--small product--thumbnail grid grid-align grid--1-col grid--2-col-tablet\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"product__info-wrapper grid__item\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv id=\"ProductInfo-template--16156684288168__main\" class=\"product__info-container product__info-container--sticky\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"product__description rte quick-add-hidden ffmeta-font\"\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p1\"\u003eLargely unknown to readers today, Sir Philip Sidney’s sixteenth-century pastoral romance\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eArcadia\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003ewas long considered one of the finest works of prose fiction in the English language. Shakespeare borrowed an episode from it for\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eKing Lear\u003c\/i\u003e; Virginia Woolf saw it as “some luminous globe” wherein “all the seeds of English fiction lie latent.” In\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eGallery of Clouds\u003c\/i\u003e, the Renaissance scholar Rachel Eisendrath has written an extraordinary homage to\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eArcadia\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003ein 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.”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p1\"\u003e\u003ci\u003eGallery of Clouds\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003eopens 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,”\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/section\u003e\n\u003c\/section\u003e\n\u003c\/main\u003e","brand":"Dotters","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":52056092541221,"sku":"9781681375434","price":19.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2167\/5269\/files\/eisendrath.2.webp?v=1772754494","url":"https:\/\/dottersbooks.com\/products\/gallery-of-clouds-by-rachel-eisendrath","provider":"Dotters Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}