What happens when we look at a painting? What do we think about? What do we imagine? How can we explain, even to ourselves, what we see or think we see? And how can art historians interpret with any seriousness what they observe? In six engaging, short narrative "fictions," each richly illustrated in color, Daniel Arasse, one of the most brilliant art historians of our time, cleverly and gracefully guides readers through a variety of adventures in seeing, from Velazquez to Titian, Bruegel to Tintoretto.

By demonstrating that we don't really see what these paintings are trying to show us, Arasse makes it clear that we need to take a closer look. In chapters that each have a different form, including a letter, an interview, and an animated conversation with a colleague, the book explores how these pictures teach us about ways of seeing across the centuries. In the process, Arasse freshly lays bare the dazzling power of painting. Fast-paced and full of humor as well as insight, this is a book for anyone who cares about really looking at, seeing, and understanding paintings."

An NYRB Classics Original Emmanuel Bove was one of the most original writers to come out of twentieth-century France and a popular success in his day. Discovered by Colette, who arranged for the publication of his first novel, "My Friends," Bove enjoyed a busy literary career, until the German occupation silenced him. During his lifetime, Bove's novels and stories were admired by Rainer Maria Rilke, the surrealists, Albert Camus, and Samuel Beckett, who said of him that "more than anyone else he has an instinct for the essential detail." "Henry Duchemin and His Shadows" is the perfect introduction to Bove's world, with its cast of stubborn isolatoes who call to mind Herman Melville's Bartleby, Robert Walser's "little men," and Jean Rhys's lost women. The poet of the flophouse and the dive, the park bench and the pigeon's crumb, Bove is also a deeply empathetic writer for whom no defeat is so great as to silence desire.

"Such was the battle that raged between Cousin K and me: good done badly; evil done well." And such is the twisted logic of good and bad, right and wrong, knitted into this novella by one of the most powerful voices to emerge from North Africa in our time. With his father brutally killed as a traitor during a national liberation war and his older brother an army officer far away, the young narrator lives reclusively with his mother, who scorns him. He turns to his young cousin for affection, only to be mocked and humiliated so deeply that his love becomes hopelessly entangled with hatred. Fate places a young woman in the narrator's path when he rescues her from a violent attack, and the reawakening of his confused passions proceeds toward terrible vengeance. In this nameless narrator's tormented reflections, played out against the backdrop of an indifferent world, Yasmina Khadra plumbs the mysteries of the crippled heart's desires.

"It is to me that we owe our immortality, and this is the story that proves it beyond all doubt." With this sentence Rene Belletto begins a novel that compresses every genre he has worked in-thriller, science fiction, experimental literature, horror-into one breathless narrative in which what is at stake is nothing less than our own immortality. Playing with the expectations of the reader, Belletto constructs a logical puzzle that defies logic, much like the "almost-perpetual motion machine" invented by the narrator of this novel and his father. What sets the story in (perpetual) motion is a package of frozen seafood. This lowly mechanism triggers a series of picaresque and otherworldly events, from the storyteller's meeting with Fate disguised as a beautiful woman, to the kidnapping of his daughter, to his amorous reunion with the younger half-sister of a high school friend, to the elimination of death from the world. It's a funny business, but Belletto's playful and falsely transparent language opens the book to such serious matters as explorations of death, immortality, love, and the innocence of children.