Vermeer in Bosnia: Selected Writings

There are writers who specialize in the strange and others whose genius is to find the strangeness in the familiar, the unexpected meanings in stories we thought we knew. Of that second category, Lawrence Weschler is the master. Witness the pieces in this splendidly disorienting collection, spanning twenty years of his career and the full range of his concerns-which is to say, practically everything.

Only Lawrence Weschler could reveal the connections between the twentieth century's Yugoslav wars and the equally violent Holland in which Vermeer created his luminously serene paintings. In his profile of Roman Polanski, Weschler traces the filmmaker's symbolic negotiations with his nightmarish childhood during the Holocaust. Here, too, are meditations on artists Ed Kienholz and David Hockney, on the author's grandfather and daughter, and on the light and earthquakes of his native Los Angeles. Haunting, elegant, and intoxicating, Vermeer in Bosniaawakens awe and wonder at the world around us.

Lawrence Weschler is the author of more than ten books, including Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, which was shortlisted for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He was a staff writer at The New Yorker for more than twenty years and is a regular contributor to McSweeney’s. Since 2001 he has been the director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University. He lives in Westchester County, New York, with his wife and daughter.