Stories of Art and Artists

Stories of Art and Artists gathers two centuries of stories from around the world. From Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Artist of the Beautiful and Albert Camus's The Artist at Work to Bernard Malamud's Rembrandt's Hat and Aimee Bender's The Color Master, the tales collected here range from haunting fables about the power of art to vivid portraits of those who create.

Featured art forms include sculpture, pottery, architecture, miniatures, landscapes, portraits, and abstract painting, illumined in brilliant stories by such great writers as Honor de Balzac, Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, Marguerite Yourcenar, John Berger, William Boyd, Doris Lessing, Valerie Martin, Julian Barnes, Orhan Pamuk, and A. S. Byatt. Writers have long been fascinated by the idea of artistic genius, the relationship between portraits and their subjects, the inspirational role of muses, and the effects on artists of ambition, failure, and success.