New York Review of Books: 160 pages, $20
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“Literature,” Rachel Eisendrath insists, “is a history of retrospection.” The observation comes early in “Gallery of Clouds,” her brief but intense meditation on the pastoral form, Philip Sidney and all the ways we find ourselves reconfigured by reading books. This is not to say that “Gallery of Clouds” is a treatise on how reading is good for us; Eisendrath has little interest in making such a case. Rather, it is an inquiry into style. At its center is the notion that a book is less a fixed thing, a text to be parsed, than something inherently subjective.