"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"It takes a remarkable writer to produce texts at once so insightful and eclectic. Most Substacks...do not merit being turned into books. But Hart's playful reflections on topics as varied as baseball, music, ghosts in Japanese culture, commentary on Mr. Toad, Cormac McCarthy's literary merits, and Australia evince an artful wordsmith, able to write on any topic with joy and honesty, yet without taking himself too seriously." - Providence
