Excerpt from The Prize by Jill Bialosky, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

It was rare that he saw a contemporary artist whose work invited comparisons to the old masters. The art world was insular, and so much of the time no one was looking back more than fifty years. Agnes clearly was.

She traveled to the back of the studio where some canvasses were stacked and put up a miniature, a study of a girl that also appeared in the canvas. Her head was slightly turned so that her gaze stared back at him. Her hair was pulled back behind a scarf. He looked at the painting again. The girl, with her tender and wanting eyes, reminded him of his first love, Tess. He hadn't thought of her in years.

The paintings were beautiful with an edge of something darker and deeper. In the juxtaposition of creation and destruction, she brought to life in a personal way the agony of the lives that had been lost when the towers collapsed. He thought it would be something impossible to catch and yet she had. He was convinced that this work would define a particular moment in history. No contemporary painter that he knew of had yet to capture it. He stepped closer to the canvas. "It's gorgeous. And so much feeling."

"I'm too close to the work, I can't always see it. I view the studio as a room of visual problems to be solved," she said, with a sigh. She worked until she was depleted, afraid to stop, as if there were an emptiness inside her that needed to be continually filled to validate her self-worth. He'd seen it in other artists before and knew it in the vulnerability in her eyes.

She slowly revealed the other finished canvases, at first shyly, as if exposing parts of herself. Seeing how each of the fifteen paintings reflected off the others, magnifying the whole series like the prisms in a diamond, he was more convinced of her talent. He had to be the one to show it. It was the most original and daring work he'd seen in years. He asked about her process. She worked from drawings, hundreds of them. She lifted her head to push back a spring of curls that had come loose from her bandana and explained that from the drawings to a finished painting might take two to three years. She touched the layered paint and then leaned in to smell it. "My work is focused on 9/11 now but really I'm interested in it as one piece—our piece—of the history of human anguish. And how painting bears witness to it. I know it sounds rather grand."

She motioned him toward an old fold-up wooden chair, then scooted another chair across from him, sat down, opened her fridge, took out two small plastic bottles of Evian, and offered him one. A man's gold Rolex wristwatch slid along her willowy wrist when she raised her arm. Maybe her boyfriend's. She wound her long legs around the leg of the chair, opened her water, and took a swig. She studied him as if she were drinking him. It made him uncomfortable. He stretched his neck awkwardly.

Realizing she'd embarrassed him, she took a breath and sighed. "I'm exhausted. I haven't left the studio in weeks. It's amazing how much isolation goes into each painting. All the doubts and second-guessing. And then voila, something happens and it paints itself." She half smiled and cocked her head, pleased with herself.

To indulge her, or maybe because it was true, he said that the paintings felt as if she'd dug deep to make them. She turned her head up and laughed. She asked if he knew the painter, Nate Fisher. Of course he did. Edward couldn't open an art journal or walk into a gallery without hearing about or seeing Nate Fisher. He was one of the most visible contemporary painters on the scene. She explained that he was still teaching at Columbia when she did her MFA and she'd been his student. "I was doing a lot of portraits of strangers. I was sort of lost. My first studio visit with him, he told me he could tell I didn't care about them. He told me to start over, to only paint what I couldn't forget." She explained that she started working from images that she was personally close to and that she'd been accused of exploiting her family's tragedy in a piece in Art Forum. Her parents immigrated from Ireland with only the clothes on their backs. She worked from a specific visual memory of her parents' homeland where she saw beauty embedded with a sense of loss and regret as if from beyond the grave. She explained her interest in the idea of inheritance—of what she could give back, through her work. She was riding her bike across the Brooklyn Bridge into the city when she saw the first tower come crashing down. She quieted, looked down, and then raised her eyes. "I'll never forget it. We have no control over what haunts us. We're helpless to it." It completely changed her life. She was afraid to ride the subway, cross bridges. "Art must capture what were afraid of most," she said.

Excerpted from The Prize by Jill Bialosky. Copyright © 2015 by Jill Bialosky. Excerpted by permission of Counterpoint Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.