Regarding Ingres:Fourteen Short Stories

<b>Talented emerging fiction writers find inspiration in one of the most famous paintings in New York’s Frick Collection: Jean-August-Dominique Ingres’s <i>Comtesse d’Haussonville</i> from 1845.</b><br><br>Following the successful literary musings on art at the Frick, <i>The Sleeve Should Be Illegal</i> and <i>Cocktails with a Curator</i>, this anthology of newly commissioned texts from graduate students in New York University’s Creative Writing Program pays homage to one of the institution’s most celebrated paintings.<br><br>Gathered here are fourteen fictional stories inspired by one of Ingres’s most captivating portrait paintings. A detail of the work—the fine silk dress, a red ribbon, a shawl casually draped over the arm of a chair, the contents of a tabletop, the contemplative pose—is the starting point for each story. The pieces range from gothic tales that take place at the time of the painting in the mid-nineteenth century and stories that use the countess as a key character to a present-day ghost story and inventive sagas that take representations of the countess to faraway lands: Poland, Trinidad and Tobago, Brazil, India, and a heaven that is populated solely by Black people.<br><br>The faculty adviser for the project is best-selling novelist Darin Strauss, who writes the book’s introduction. Illustrated with Ingres’s famous portrait as well as with many lush details, this one-of-a-kind volume is an ode, both traditional and postmodern, to a glorious work of art.