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A lively and wide-ranging collection from David Bentley Hart, A Gathering of Leaves invites readers to rediscover the sheer joy of reading.
David Bentley Hart brings together reflections on everything from literature and music to baseball and tortoises in his newest book. The pieces roam freely in subject and tone—sometimes serious, sometimes playful—but are united by Hart’s distinctive voice: witty, attentive, and unafraid of digression.
Rather than advancing a single argument or theme, Hart lets each essay follow its own path. Short notes sit alongside longer meditations; close readings give way to cultural commentary or unexpected enthusiasms. Hart focuses on the joys of style, observation, and thought in motion. A Gathering of Leaves is a book for readers who enjoy the art of the word—writing that informs and entertains, wanders and returns, and reminds us why reading itself remains a pleasure.
"David Bentley Hart is a great essayist. He is a belle-lettrist in the old-fashioned sense, but at the same time a contemporary thinker and writer of real consequence. He is possessed of immense reading in a wide variety of areas, and he has the capacity to get to the root of the matter without wasting time. I regard him as one of the most important intellectuals of our era and someone whose work is of real and lasting significance. This is an important book, one that deserves the widest possible audience." —Henry Weinfield, author of An Alphabet
“David Bentley Hart is a polymathic marvel; he is also one of the best prose stylists writing today. Whether he is writing about baseball, AI, the deficiencies of Cormac McCarthy, the reality of mermaids, the sublimities of Proust, or (perhaps best of all) prose style itself, his 'commitment to the mercurial and occasional' never fails to challenge—and delight.” —Norman Finkelstein, author of Track
“David Bentley Hart is our greatest living essayist. More than any previous collection, A Gathering of Leaves reminds us of the astonishing range of his interests, crochets, and enmities. It is one of those rare books that invites not praise but tears of divine gratitude.” —Matthew Walther, opinion writer for The New York Times
“These thirty-eight 'ephemera' combine bits of autobiography with the Beatles, Cormac McCarthy, turtles, AI, Nabokov, a fascinating memoir on Japanese ghosts, and a great deal more—all to a constant background hum of fury at the world’s political folly. Everything is vintage Hart: metaphor versus mechanism, wonder versus the closed, passive mind.” —Caryl Emerson, author of All the Same the Words Don’t Go Away
“It seems almost unfair that one man should be able to write so well, and so variously, about so many subjects—literary translation, Australia, Nabokov's favorite dictionary, phone booths, and (obviously) baseball. Here they are all brought together by Hart's infectious enthusiasm and by a style of thought and expression that draws sparks from whatever it touches.” —Matthew Boudway, senior editor of Commonweal
David Bentley Hart is a prolific theologian, philosopher, cultural commentator, and writer of fiction. He is the author and translator of over twenty-five books, including The Light of Tabor.
A Brief Introduction
1. Non Compos: Extracts from the Court Record
2. America’s Team (or: The New York Yankees Are a Moral Abomination)
3. On Writing English Prose: Ideals, Exemplars, Rules
4. Birthday Greetings for Marcel
5. Goethe’s “Orientalism”
6. The Georgia Peach
7. Nabokovian Ruminations: Four Notes
8. The Peach Blossom Spring: A Translation (and apologia)
9. The Saint James Bible
10. Encomium for a Tortoise
11. By Sea-Girls Wreathed
12. Nothing at the Bottom: Four Notes on AI
13. Wings of Light: On Translating Proust
14. La règle du jeu: Five Notes on the Great American Pastime
15. Organism and Paradigm: Six Notes on Mind and Matter
16. Frank: The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole
17. Revenants: Five Notes on Photography and the Deep Past
18. O Divine Monkey!
19. Echoes From the Past: Four Notes Mostly on the Beatles
20. On Yūrei, Jibakurei, and Phone Booths: Four Notes on Ghostly Japan
21. A Tale Told by an Idiot
22. The Ethos of the Ants
23. Mr Toad and the Judge: On the Relative Merits of Kenneth Grahame and Cormac McCarthy
24. Thoughts on The Hindus: Wendy Doniger and the Rise of Indian Nationalism
25. "Dream-Journey to Mount Tian-Mu: A Sigh of Farewell"
26. Noli Episcopari: Four Notes on Political Power
27. Dispatches from the Antipodes
28. The Net of Indra
29. The Cunning of History: Seven Notes on Chance and Fate
30. Scattered Reflections: On Themes Cinematic and Televisual
31. Dispatches from the Flowering Fenlands
32. The State of Exception
33. Slouching Towards DC
34. L’Ébauche d’un homme civilisé: On Paul Valéry
35. Neither Wilt Thou Suffer Thine Holy One to See Corruption
36. On The Feast of Stephen: Six Notes on Boxing Day
37. Gods of the Wayside
38. Leave at Once, or I Shall Set the Dogs on You: Mon Doppelgänger, Moi-Même