Bøger af Nicholas Delbanco

ABOUT THE BOOK Novelist, critic, essayist, screenwriter, teacher, traveler, and art aficionado, Nicholas Delbanco has here compiled a mosaic of his life as he glances backwards and forwards from the vantage point of his eightieth year. Each home relocation with its inevitable remodeling becomes a metaphor for the reconstruction of the self over his lifetime. In episodic riffs, Still Life at Eighty revisits seven houses where Delbanco welcomed a panoply of literati, such as Mary Ruefle, Mary Lee Settle, Mary Robison, John Ashbery, John Cheever, John Irving, and John Updike. Each abode becomes a receptacle of memory, as he recalls his friendships with the likes of James Baldwin, Grace Paley, Frederick Busch, Donald Barthelme, and Russell Banks.  Still Life at Eighty is saturated with artistic appreciation, which colors Delbanco’s life from early childhood to his eightieth year. The grandson of collectors (whose paintings were plundered by the Nazis), nephew of a London gallerist, son of an accomplished painter, and a collector himself, Delbanco summons his reminiscences of art, artifacts, and artists as he pivots from a youthful artistic apprenticeship to become a prolific professional writer, sustained, and inspired by his wife of fifty-three years, Elena; his daughters, Francesca and Andrea; and five granddaughters. Delbanco finds solace in the things of this world: a Biedermeier desk, an Ekoi mask, and an instrument case that held the fabled Countess of Stanlein ex-Paganini Stradivarius Violoncello of 1707—all reminders of a treasured past. Together with these cherished artifacts, former homes, and the myriad writers and artists who slip in and out of this erudite memoir, Still Life at Eighty makes readers privy not only to Delbanco’s rich experiences, but also to the vast aesthetic wealth of his long life.

A writer of “enormous sophistication” (The New York Times), Nicholas Delbanco has established himself as an intelligent and erudite fount of American literature. Reprise collects three volumes of short stories, bringing together half a century of Delbanco’s writing for the first time.Nicholas Delbanco has been many things: a student of John Updike; a teacher of noteworthy authors like Bret Easton Ellis, Andrea Barrett, and Jesmyn Ward; and even, for a while, the next-door neighbor of James Baldwin. Across a career spanning nearly six decades, Delbanco has published more than thirty books of fiction and nonfiction and edited a dozen more.  He is the recipient of numerous awards. The stories collected here represent a sort of retrospective, capturing the restless and boundlessly intelligent Nicholas Delbanco at key moments in his artistic life.With painterly eye for detail and texture, Reprise offers readers an invitation to glimpse American literature at its most elegant and graceful.

*a novel that incorporates not only a fictionalized history of Delbanco's own extraordinary family history but also re-imagines the turbulent history of emigrant German Jews in the twentieth century

One of America's leading literary scholars explores the fascinating question of why some people's creative talents flourish with age while others' fade.

Ruminates on the life of the writer and the significance of language as art. This title takes as its central conceit a famous anecdote about Ernest Hemingway's early work: Hemingway's first wife, Hadley, going by train from their apartment in Paris to visit him in Switzerland, brought along, at his request, a suitcase full of his work-in-progress.

Weaves varied reflections to reveal an understanding of the relationships among literature, the past, and the world around us. Describing trips to such diverse destinations as Namibia; Afghanistan; Bellagio, Italy; and the Bellagio in Las Vegas, this book conveys the apprehension of visiting new places.