The Art of Fielding: A Novel

by Chad Harbach

Overview

At Westish College, a small school on the shore of Lake Michigan, baseball star Henry Skrimshander seems destined for big league stardom. But when a routine throw goes disastrously off course, the fates of five people are upended.

Henry's fight against self-doubt threatens to ruin his future. College president Guert Affenlight, a longtime bachelor, has fallen unexpectedly and helplessly in love. Owen Dunne, Henry's gay roommate and teammate, becomes caught up in a dangerous affair. Mike Schwartz, the Harpooners' team captain and Henry's best friend, realizes he has guided Henry's career at the expense of his own. And Pella Affenlight, Guert's daughter, returns to Westish after escaping an ill-fated marriage, determined to start a new life.

As the season counts down to its climactic final game, these five are forced to confront their deepest hopes, anxieties, and secrets. In the process they forge new bonds, and help one another find their true paths. Written with boundless intelligence and filled with the tenderness of youth, The Art of Fielding is an expansive, warmhearted novel about ambition and its limits, about family and friendship and love, and about commitment--to oneself and to others.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316192163
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	09/07/2011
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	53,987
File size:	944 KB

About the Author

Chad Harbach grew up in Wisconsin, graduated from Harvard and received an MFA in fiction writing at the University of Virginia. He is currently a co-editor of n+1, which he cofounded, and lives in Virginia.

What People are Saying About This

David James Duncan

"That baseball rewards languid virtuosos and frothing monomaniacs about equally is one of the game's weird fascinations. That Academe does the same would not be useful information in the hands of a hack. But The Art of Fielding marries the national pastime to the life of the mind, takes off running, and never flags. Chad Harbach's pen shatters stereotypes like fastballs shatter bats. His sentence-making keeps things fluid and tense as a September pennant race. When the best shortstop alive sounds believably like a Tibetan lama, and when a thrown ball striking a shovel head at dusk leaves your own head ringing with certainty that truth and friendship have triumphed, you know you're in the hands of a writer you can trust." --(David James Duncan, author of The Brothers K and The River Why )

Nicholas Dawidoff

"Here is that rarest of pleasures, a baseball novel by someone who really knows baseball. The beautiful part is that The Art of Fielding is mere baseball fiction the way Moby Dick is just a fish story. I read this vividly written, powerfully imagined story of a group of young ballplayers and the small-college world they inhabit in a single weekend—read it when I was supposed to be going to the park, making lunch, seeing a movie. Chad Harbach is that kind of writer, so affecting, subtle, funny and true that he gets in the way of your plans and makes everything better." --(Nicholas Dawidoff author of The Catcher Was A Spy and editor of Baseball: A Literary Anthology )

Jonathan Evison

"Spectacular! The Art of Fielding is a wise, warm-hearted, self-assured, and fiercely readable debut, which heralds the coming of a young American writer to watch. Harbach's characters live and breathe, yearn, ache, and in the end, make you love them for their flaws. You won't want this book to end." --(Jonathan Evison, author of All About Lulu and West of Here )

Jonathan Franzen

"Reading The Art of Fielding is like watching a hugely gifted young shortstop: you keep waiting for the errors, but there are no errors. First novels this complete and consuming come along very, very seldom." --(Jonathan Franzen, author of Freedom )