Now finally collected into a single volume, the Sherbrookes trilogy—Possession, Sherbrookes, and Stillness—is Nicholas Delbanco's most celebrated achievement. Centering upon one New England clan and their estate in southwestern Vermont—a full thousand acres, including the bleak and chilly Big House, from which the volatile Sherbrookes have such trouble escaping—these books form a virtuoso portrait of the love, pride, resentment, and even madness we inherit from our families. Written in his characteristically opulent, bravura prose, Delbanco is here revealed as a Henry James for our time: a passionate cataloger of human strength and frailty. Edited and revised by the author some thirty years after its first publication, the trilogy—“made new” as the single-volume Sherbrookes—can now be rediscovered by a new generation of readers.
SDPL - A delightfully aimless, somewhat rueful collection of nineessays on places visited and friends lost. Novelist/memorist is a writer'swriter, always in search of a fresh story, turn of phrase, or book to read. A"Guide Bleu" for the literary armchair.
A family album: leather-bound, thin, its pages yellow with age. There are images on every page--black and white to start with, then Kodacolor." So begins Nicholas Delbanco's new novel, It Is Enough, a chronicle of the German-Jewish Hochmann family, which is also a chronicle of the twentieth century and its repercussions here and now. While Frederick Hochmann, a widower, looks back on his long life from New Canaan, Connecticut, the drama of his family's past surges to the surface. Ranging from Berlin to Berkeley, from the 1930s to the 2010s, from scenes of the greatest tenderness to the greatest callowness, It Is Enough is the work of one of the most accomplished American prose stylists since Henry James.
America grows older yet stays focused on its young. Whatever hill we try to climb, we're "over" it by fifty and should that hill involve entertainment or athletics we're finished long before. But if younger is better, it doesn't appear that youngest is best: we want our teachers, doctors, generals, and presidents to have reached a certain age. In context after context and contest after contest, we're more than a little conflicted about elders of the tribe; when is it right to honor them, and when to say "step aside"? In Lastingness, Nicholas Delbanco, one of America's most celebrated men of letters, profiles great geniuses in the fields of visual art, literature, and music-Monet, Verdi, O'Keeffe, Yeats, among others - searching for the answers to why some artists' work diminishes with age, while others' reaches its peak. Both an intellectual inquiry into the essence of aging and creativity and a personal journey of discovery, this is a brilliant exploration of what determines what one needs to do to keep the habits of creation and achievement alive.
Running in Place is a stunning evocation of Provencal culture and history. An acclaimed novelist and essayist, Nicholas Delbanco provides a vivid portrait of a paradise still pure but not immune to progress. A perfect book for anyone who loves the work of Peter Mayle and Frances Mayes. "As entertaining travel literature, [it] ranks with the richest of the genre."--Diane Manuel, The New York Times Book Review
Twenty-five years ago, Paul Ballard was a young college professor, and Elizabeth Sieverdsen was his adoring student. Now, he is a retired and reclusive man, and she is a recently divorced and conflicted woman. Their unexpected love affair ended in tragedy, but they are about to meet again for the first time, exposing old wounds and stirring new desires.
It doesn't matter, really, if what we inherit is money or debt, a set of cats or cutlery or a portrait of grandfather Aaron. What matters is the way we deal with what's been left behind. The Vagabonds From critically acclaimed author Nicholas Delbanco comes a novel about a family with a mysterious inheritance and a secret tie to history... Born and raised in Saratoga Springs, New York, the three Saperstone siblings have drifted apart and lead very separate lives. On Cape Cod, Joanna manages a B and B and a teenage daughter, feeling vulnerable and alone. In Ann Arbor, Claire flirts with becoming an interior decorator while coming to terms with a personal betrayal. And in Berkeley, David carves a niche as a Web designer-yet he yearns to be a painter. Suddenly, these middle-class and ordinary lives will come together again in an extraordinary way. The death of their proud, spirited mother draws the Saperstones home to the New York resort town of Saratoga Springs. Gathered again in the family's ramshackle cottage, they discover a stunning legacy from 1916. Almost a century ago, the legendary "Vagabonds"-captains of industry Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone, inventor Thomas Edison, and naturalist John Burroughs-came to this town during one of their road trip adventures. Here they encountered a beautiful young woman, whom they would burden with a scandalous secret and a dazzling windfall. Now, when decades later this inheritance comes to the three Saperstones, it will utterly transform them-not so much for the riches it brings, but for how it will reconfigure the past they share...and a future they had thought beyond their grasp. Arresting in its poignancy and indelibly original, The Vagabonds is a brilliant marriage of a truth stranger than fiction and a fiction filled with transcendent truth.
One of America's most acclaimed literary talents delivers a deeply moving, memoir-oriented novel about a German-Jewish family's attempts to resettle in the aftermath of World War II.
In an insightful and original meditation on the writer's craft that is by turns descriptive and prescriptive, Delbanco explores how literary virtuosity is achieved, how the writing of fiction can be taught, and the way literature functions for writer and reader equally. The book includes a novella called "The Lost Suitcase," revolving around a famous anecdote about Hemingway's early work and how it came to be lost.
Drawing lessons from writers of all ages and writing across genres, a distinguished teacher and writer reveals the enduring importance of writing for our time In this new contribution to Yale University Press's Why X Matters series, a distinguished writer and scholar tackles central questions of the discipline of writing. Drawing on his own experience with such mentors as John Updike, John Gardner, and James Baldwin, and in turn having taught such rising stars as Jesmyn Ward, Delbanco looks in particular at questions of influence and the contradictory, simultaneous impulses toward imitation and originality. Part memoir, part literary history, and part analysis, this unique text will resonate with students, writers, writing teachers, and bibliophiles.
Delbanco (English language and literature, U. of Michigan) traces the progression of the repair of the famous Stradivarius cello of 1707 that belongs to cellist Bernard Greenhouse. He also recounts the history of this outstanding instrument, which represents the highest standard of craftsmanship. As with other such instruments, it has been copied often, and physically analyzed, but never duplicated in quality. c. Book News Inc.
A fictional account of the life of eighteenth-century American physicist and inventor Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, as seen by his last surviving relative.
After assisting his cancer-stricken wife to commit suicide, Dr. Peter Julius takes charge of a hospice, where several unexplained deaths inspire fearful questions about the doctor's motives
Portraits of three artistic prodigies who died young--Stephen Crane (writer), Dora Carrington (painter), and George Gershwin (composer)--that form the centerpiece of a beautiful and fascinating inquiry into creation, mortality, and the enigma of promise: What would they have done had they lived longer?
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