Bestselling novelist Siri Hustvedt's inspired collection of essays on painting is now available in paperback. In Mysteries of the Rectangle, Hustvedt concentrates her narrative gifts on the works of such masters as Francisco Goya, Jan Vermeer, Jean-Baptiste-Simon Chardin, Gerhard Richter, and Joan Mitchell. Through her own personal experiences, Hustvedt is able to reveal things hidden until now in plain sight: an egglike detail in Vermeer's Woman with a Pearl Necklace and the many hidden self-portraits in Goya's series of drawings, Los Caprichos, as well as in his famous painting The Third of May. Most importantly, these essays exhibit the passion, thrill, and sheer pleasure of bewilderment a work of art can produceif you simply take the time to look.

""[Hustvedt} gives you the illusion of seeing as if for the first time works of art that you thought you knew well. After reading her luminous book, most prose about art seems merely perfunctory. The generous publisher has here provided a beautiful, happily affordable publication."" - Modern Painters

""Siri Hustvedt possesses a remarkable visual sensibility. Her responses to paintings are both visceral and intellectual....At their best, her essays combine the insights of her intuitive eye with an extensive knowledge of Western painting."" - San Francisco Chronicle