HARBACH, Chad. The Art of Fielding. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2015.

Octavo. Full brown leather. Spine with raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. Gilt lettering and design to covers. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. 512 pp. Signed Collector's Edition. Part of the Easton Press Signed Modern Classics series. Signed by the author on the special limitation page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity, edition card, and bookplate adhered to front endpaper. Originally published New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2011.

Chad Harbach (b. 1975) grew up in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, attended Harvard, took his MFA at the University of Virginia, and co-founded the literary magazine n+1, which under his editorial direction became one of the most influential journals of ideas in contemporary American letters. The Art of Fielding took the better part of a decade to write and sold to Little, Brown for $665,000 — one of the largest advances paid for a debut American novel in recent memory. Jonathan Franzen, who read it in manuscript, wrote: "First novels this complete and consuming come along very, very seldom." The New York Times called it "wonderful... a novel that is every bit as entertaining as it is affecting."

Westish College is a small liberal arts school on the shore of Lake Michigan, fictional and deliberately so — a place of sufficient obscurity that its baseball team's unlikely run of success can be felt as something genuinely meaningful by the people who inhabit it. Henry Skrimshander is the shortstop at the centre of the novel's machinery: a boy from South Dakota, physically unimpressive, discovered and developed by team captain Mike Schwartz into something approaching perfection as a fielder. The novel's title comes from the manual written by the fictional Mexican shortstop Aparicio Rodriguez — The Art of Fielding: A Short Manual on the Exploding Interior — whose aphorisms Henry has lived by for years and which Harbach uses to frame his themes.

Then, in Henry's junior year, a routine throw goes disastrously off course and strikes his roommate Owen in the face. The error is unremarkable; it happens to every player eventually. What it does to Henry is the subject of the novel: a paralysis of doubt, compounding with each subsequent attempt, that threatens to end his career and his prospects for a major league life. Around this central situation Harbach constructs four other parallel narratives — Owen's dangerous affair with college president Guert Affenlight; Affenlight's own late-life disruption; Schwartz's discovery that he has exhausted himself in the service of someone else's talent; and Pella Affenlight's return to Westish after a failed marriage — that together make the novel what it is: not a baseball novel, finally, but a novel about the relationship between a person and their defining gift, and what happens when the certainty that has always structured your life suddenly fails.

Near fine. Some very faint markings along gilt edges; otherwise fine throughout.

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Catalogue Number: HH000523