Largely unknown to readers today, Sir Philip Sidney's sixteenth-century pastoral romance Arcadia was long considered one of the finest works of prose fiction in the English language. In Gallery of Clouds, Renaissance scholar Rachel Eisendrath has written an extraordinary homage to Arcadia in the form of a book-length essay divided into passing clouds. Gallery of Clouds opens in New York City with a vision, of meeting Virginia Woolf in the afterlife. From here, in this act of magical reading, the book scrolls out in a series of reflective pieces connected through an association of ideas. Golden threadlines tie each part to the next: a rupture of time in a Pisanello painting; Montaigne's practice of revision in his essays; the first African-American librarian in the Chicago public library system; reading Willa Cather to her grandmother in her Chicago apartment. Eisendrath's wondrously woven hybrid work extols the materiality of reading, its pleasures and delights, with wild leaps and bounding grace.