Overview

Arriving as a young writer in an ancient Dutch town, Benjamin Moser found himself visiting--casually at first, and then more and more obsessively--the country's great museums. Beyond the sainted Rembrandt--who harbored a startling darkness--and the mysterious Vermeer, whose true subject, it turned out, was lurking in plain sight, Moser got to know a whole galaxy of geniuses: the doomed virtuoso Carel Fabritius, the anguished wunderkind Jan Lievens, the deaf prodigy Hendrik Avercamp. Year after year, as he tried to make a life for himself in the Netherlands, Moser found friends among these centuries-dead artists. And he found that they, too, were struggling with the same questions that he was. Why do we make art? What even is art, anyway--and what is an artist? What does it mean to succeed as an artist, and what does it mean to fail? The Upside-Down World is an invitation to ask these questions, and to turn them on their heads: to look, and then to look again. This is Holland and its great artists as we've never seen them before. And it's a highly personal coming-of-age-story, twenty years in the making: a revealing self-portrait by one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation.

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Benjamin Moser was born in Houston, Texas, and lives in Utrecht. He is the author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, and for Sontag: Her Life and Work, he won the Pulitzer Prize. Paul Boehmer attended his first Shakespearean play while in high school; he knew then that he was destined to become the classically trained actor he is today. Graduating with a master's degree, Paul was cast as Hamlet by the very stage actor who inspired his career path. A nod from the Universe he'd chosen aright! Paul has worked on Broadway and extensively in regional theater. Coinciding with another of his passions, sci-fi, Paul has been cast in various roles in many episodes of Star Trek. Paul's love of literature and learning led him by nature to his work as a narrator for audiobooks, his latest endeavour. Paul is married to the love of his life, Offir, and they live in Los Angeles with their two midnight-rambling tomcats, Dread and David.

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