The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters

Written by Benjamin Moser

Narrated by Paul Boehmer

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Highbridge Company
• Release date: Oct 31, 2023
• ISBN: 9781696613422

Benjamin Moser

Benjamin Moser (Houston, 1976), escritor, editor y traductor, ha sido columnista en Harper’s Magazine y The New York Times Book Review, y ha colaborado con medios como The New Yorker, Condé Nast Traveler y The New York Review of Books. Ha traducido libros del francés, el español, el portugués y el holandés. Es especialista en Clarice Lispector, a la que ha editado y traducido, y a la que ha dedicado el libro Por qué este mundo. Una biografía de Clarice Lispector, que fue finalista del National Book Critics Circle Award y lo hizo acreedor del Premio Estatal a la Diplomacia Cultural de Brasil por contribuir a divulgar internacionalmente a la autora.