Carravagio and the Unseen (first published as an essay in Antaeus in 1989, and republished in Writers on Artists, edited by Daniel Halpern, by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (1990).
When the poet Daniel Halpern, then the editor of the great literary magazine, Antaeus, asked a bunch of writers for essays about a favorite visual artist, I instantly chose Caravaggio. No painter of any era has spoken to me with more overwhelming force. As a sweet bonus I and my then–girlfriend, the sculptor Andrea Blum, spent a summer in Italy, just looking and looking and looking at his masterpieces.
Koch is the author of two novels and five books of nonfiction, ranging from history to literary history and a handbook on creative writing called The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop. His most recent book is Hitler’s Pawn – The Boy Assassin and the Holocaust about the life of a Jewish teenager who in 1938 assassinated a minor German Diplomat and gave Hitler his pretext for Kristallnacht, and had worldwide repercussions in the lead up to the second World War.