{"product_id":"gallery-of-clouds-book-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\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Largely 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.\"\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\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.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49532253045009,"sku":"GOR013328546","price":8.5,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49533636804881,"sku":"GOR013449099","price":10.7,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49764022518033,"sku":"CIN1681375435VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49809404199185,"sku":"NGR9781681375434","price":13.89,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50264785551633,"sku":"CIN1681375435G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1681375435.jpg?v=1751410463","url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-gb\/products\/gallery-of-clouds-book-rachel-eisendrath-9781681375434","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}