The Art of Fielding [Hardcover]

‘Reading The Art of Fielding is like watching a hugely gifted young shortstop: you keep waiting for the errors, but there are no errors. First novels this complete and consuming come along very, very seldom.’ Jonathan Franzen

‘Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding is one of those rare novels – like Michael Chabon’s Mysteries of Pittsburgh or John Irving’s The World According to Garp – that seems to appear out of nowhere, and then dazzles and bewitches and inspires, until you nearly lose your breath from the enjoyment and satisfaction, as well as the unexpected news-blast that the novel is very much alive and well.’
James Patterson

‘I gave myself over completely and scarcely paused for meals. Like all successful works of literature The Art of Fielding is an autonomous universe, much like the one we inhabit although somehow more vivid.’
Jay McInerney

‘Compulsively readable’ Literary Review

“Chad Harbach has hit a game-ender with The Art of Fielding. It’s pure fun, easy to read, as if the other Fielding had a hand in it — as if Tom Jones were about baseball and college life.” – John Irving

“The Novel of the Month Season Year…. Riveting…[The Art of Fielding] emerges fully formed, a world unto itself. Harbach writes with a tender, egoless virtuosity…There’s just something so easy and riveting about the way this book’s layers unfold; not since Lonesome Dove have I been so sorry to let a group of characters go.” –Andres Corsello, GQ

“Chad Harbach makes the case for baseball, thrillingly, in his slow, precious and altogether excellent first novel…. It seems a stretch for a baseball novel to hold truth and beauty and the entire human condition in its mitt, well THE ART OF FIELDING isn’t really a baseball novel at all, or not only. It’s also a campus novel and a bromance (and for that matter a full-fledged gay romance), a comedy of manners and a tragicomedy of errors…Welcome to the big leagues, kid. Now get out there and play.” – Gregory Cowles, The New York Times Book Review

“Charming…Watchers of Friday Night Lights will be at home in Harbach’s generously told novel…But there’s also much more here to interest readers of the contemporary literary novel….The main order of business here is to entertain, and in this Harbach succeeds.” – Wyatt Mason, The New Yorker

‘A terrifically engaging novel… once embarked on this long and languorous novel, you will be rewarded by a page-turning, beguiling and wonderfully warm-hearted read’. Sunday Times

‘This is an outstanding novel about sport and, in Henry Skrimshander, Harbach has created a character who will keep sports psychologists in conversation for years’ Mike Atherton, The Times

‘Harbach is a first novelist working skillfully with some of the archetypes of American literature… and his hands, unlike Henry’s, are nimble from start to end’ Spectator

‘Pitch perfect… You don’t need to be a baseball fan to love this book. It’s wonderfully entertaining and, like its hero, it really does deliver’ Lead review, Tatler

‘Delightfully easy to read, yet brilliantly insightful and beautifully observed’ Easy Living

‘Once started The Art of Fielding is a book you want to read and read. It is deliciously oldfashioned: it simply gets on eith the business of creating vivid, layered characters and telling a good, engrossing story… Despite the baseball and trumpets, the book calmly and gracefully charms the reader’ Daily Telegraph

This weekend saw huge coverage with a full-page story in the Observer news pages, proclaiming ‘it’s already booked its place on the dinner party bookshelves among the Murakamis, the McEwans, the Zadie Smiths and the Rushdies’, and a double-page Bryan Appleyard interview in the Sunday Times Culture.

‘Charming, warm-hearted, addictive, and very hard to dislike…It creates a richly peopled world that you can fully inhabit in your mind, and to which you long to return when you put down’ Guardian

Steeped in American tradition, this moving debut hits a home run…What in less skilled hands might have been a light comic novel evolves into a debut of great warmth and weight… This is a charming, moving and slyly profound novel. You might even say Chad Harbach hit this one out of the park’ Sunday Telegraph

‘The baseball sequences are terrific… Harbach captures precisely the strangely becalmed grace that sets sportsmen like Henry apart…Very good indeed’ Independent

‘It wears its heart on its sleeve, is genuinely affecting’ Sunday Times

‘It’s about baseball but works even if you know nothing about the sport’ Grazia

‘It's left a little hole in my life the way a really good book will’ Jonathan Franzen

‘This is an outstanding novel about sport and, in Henry Skrimshander, Harbach has created a character who will keep sports psychologists in conversation for years’ Mike Atherton, The Times

‘Charming, warm-hearted, addictive’ Guardian

‘Once started The Art of Fielding is a book you want to read and read. It is deliciously old-fashioned: it simply gets on with the business of creating vivid, layered characters and telling a good, engrossing story’ Daily Telegraph

‘An intricate, poised, tingling debut … leaves you longing, lingering, and a baseball convert long after the last page’ Téa Obreht, author of The Tiger’s Wife, winner of the Orange Prize

‘Chad Harbach has hit a game-ender with The Art of Fielding. It’s pure fun, easy to read, as if the other Fielding had a hand in it — as if Tom Jones were about baseball and college life.’ John Irving

Steeped in American tradition, this moving debut hits a home run…What in less skilled hands might have been a light comic novel evolves into a debut of great warmth and weight… This is a charming, moving and slyly profound novel. You might even say Chad Harbach hit this one out of the park’ Sunday Telegraph

‘Every bit as good as billed. A big, beautiful blowout of a book, sure and generous, it reads like a throwback to the mid-20th century, when American literature was in its pomp… an exceptional debut’ Guardian

‘A terrifically engaging novel… you will be rewarded by a page-turning, beguiling and wonderfully warm-hearted read’. Sunday Times

‘The baseball sequences are terrific… Harbach captures precisely the strangely becalmed grace that sets sportsmen like Henry apart…Very good indeed’ Independent

In The Art of Fielding, we see young men who know that their four years on the baseball diamond at Westish College are all that remain of their sporting careers. Only their preternaturally gifted fielder, Henry Skrimshander, seems to have the chance to keep his dream – and theirs, vicariously – alive, until a routine throw goes disastrously off course, and the fates of five people are upended.

After his throw threatens to ruin his roommate Owen’s future, Henry’s fight against self-doubt threatens to ruin his; while Mike Schwartz, the team captain and Henry’s best friend, realizes he has guided Henry’s career at the expense of his own. Keeping a keen eye on them all, college president Guert Affenlight, a longtime bachelor, falls unexpectedly and dangerously in love, much to the surprise of his daughter, Pella, who has returned to Westish after escaping an ill-fated marriage, determined to start a new life.

Written with boundless intelligence and filled with the tenderness of youth, The Art of Fielding is an expansive, warm-hearted novel about ambition and its limits, about family and friendship and love, and about commitment – to oneself and to others.

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 the Executive Editor of n+1, which he co-founded, and lives in Brooklyn.