The Art of Fielding

A Novel

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By Chad Harbach

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$10.99

Price

$13.99 CAD

This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around September 7, 2011. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

A disastrous error on the field sends five lives into a tailspin in this widely acclaimed tale about love, life, and baseball, praised by the New York Times as "wonderful…a novel that is every bit as entertaining as it is affecting." 

Named one of the year's best books by the New York Times, NPR, The New YorkerLos Angeles TimesWashington PostWall Street JournalChristian Science MonitorBloombergKansas City StarRichmond Times-Dispatch, and Time Out New York
 
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.

"First novels this complete and consuming come along very, very seldom." –Jonathan Franzen

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On Sale
Sep 7, 2011
Page Count
528 pages
ISBN-13
9780316192163

Chad Harbach

About the Author

Chad Harbach grew up in Wisconsin, and graduated from Harvard in 1997. He was a Henry Hoyns Fellow at the University of Virginia, where he received an MFA in Fiction in 2004. He is currently a co-editor of n+1, which he cofounded, and lives in Virginia.

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