Rachel Eisendrath Gallery of Clouds

A personal and critical work that celebrates the pleasure of books and reading. Largely unknown to readers today, Sir Philip Sidney's sixteenth-century pastoral romance Arcadia was long considered one of the finest works of prose fiction in the English language. Shakespeare borrowed an episode from it for King Lear ; Virginia Woolf saw it as "some luminous globe" wherein "all the seeds of English fiction lie latent." In Gallery of Clouds , the Renaissance scholar Rachel Eisendrath has written an extraordinary homage to Arcadia 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 proud sail, my mother." Gallery of Clouds opens in New York City with 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 connected through an association of metaphors and ideas. A rupture of time in a Pisanello painting links to Montaigne's practice of revision in his essays; a brief history of prose style segues through the Chicago public library system's first African-American head branch librarian. Eisendrath's wondrously woven hybrid work extols the materiality of reading with wild leaps and delight.