Regarding Ingres

This anthology of new texts from emerging fiction writers pays homage to one of the most famous paintings in The Frick Collection, Ingres’s Comtesse d’Haussonville (1845). Each of these fourteen short stories from graduate students in New York University’s Creative Writing Program takes as its starting point a detail of the painting—the fine satin dress, the red ribbon in the subject’s hair, the shawl casually draped over the arm of a chair, the objects on the mantel. The texts range from gothic tales that take place at the time of the painting’s making to a present-day ghost story to inventive sagas that take the countess to places both terrestrial and divine.

 “This astounding assortment of new voices gives testament to the crazy vitality of our present and future literature and connects it with a brilliant sleight of hand to the richness of the cultural past. The book is both a writing workshop and a meditation on the sublime, which reveals its own crazy vitality under the pressure of this quality of attention. Bravo.”

—Jonathan Lethem

“Regarding Ingres is a collection of 14 prose gems, each reflecting in its own way the masterwork of one of the greatest portraitists who ever lived. From the first facet to the last, these stories dazzle and delight.”

— Andrew Geyer, New York Journal of Books, June 29, 2023

Authors: Introduction by Darin Strauss with stories by Mathis Clément, Najee Fareed, Nina Ferraz, Omer Friedlander, Amir Hall, Anushka Joshi, Christopher Linnix, Madeline McFarland, Jonathan Perry, Isabelle Philippe, Eric Rubeo, Erin Townsend, Devon Walker-Figueroa, and Alanna Weissman

Publisher: Rizzoli Electa in association with The Frick Collection

Hardcover, 7 1/4 x 9 1/4 in., 192 pages, 16 color illustrations