Chad harbach the brightness
- •
Book review: ‘The Art of Fielding’ by Chad Harbach
The Art of Fielding
A Novel
Chad Harbach
Little, Brown: 528 pp., $25.99
In terms of conjuring a shorthand for a certain American innocence, there are few delivery systems quite so direct as baseball. Touched on by a library’s worth of authors including John Updike, Stephen King and Don DeLillo, there’s something about the game’s deliberate pace, individual focus and enduring simplicity that seems irresistible to novelists. With that in mind, it was hard to imagine Chad Harbach’s debut novel about a scrappy college baseball team offering much new to say about the crack of the bat, the roar of the crowd or anything resembling Updike’s “lyric little bandbox” in 2011.
And yet, that’s what Harbach has done with “The Art of Fielding.” Centering on an imaginary northern Wisconsin private school and its baseball star-in-the-making Henry Skrimshander, Harbach sidesteps much of the familiar mythmaking that can go along with spinning the American pastime into literature and instead delivers a rich, warmly human story that resonates eve
- •
Chad Harbach
by
by
by
by
by
by
by
by
- •
Chad Harbach
American writer (born 1975)
Chad Harbach (born 1975[2]) is an American writer. An editor at the journal n+1, he is the author of the 2011 novel The Art of Fielding.
Early life and education
Harbach grew up in Racine, Wisconsin. His father was an accountant and his mother the head of a Montessori school.[3] Harbach graduated from Harvard University, where he befriended fellow writers and journalists Keith Gessen and Benjamin Kunkel.[4] He received an MFA from the University of Virginia[5] in 2004.[1]
n+1
In 2004, Mark Greif, Gessen, Harbach, Kunkel, and Marco Roth launched the literary journal n+1;[6] Harbach had come up with the name as early as 1998.[7] Harbach is both an editor and writer for the journal, contributing essays on environmentalism, David Foster Wallace, and the Boston Red Sox.[8]
The Art of Fielding
Harbach worked on his novel The Art of Fielding for nine years.[5] The novel, set at Westish College, a small school o
Copyright ©bilders.pages.dev 2025