Search results for ""Author Nicholas Delbanco""
Columbia University Press The Lost Suitcase: Reflections on the Literary Life
We work, each one of us, in the deep dark with no notion of what lasts. With this phrase Nicholas Delbanco reveals one of his urgent concerns: Why does a writer write? How much of his work will seem meaningful to others? In The Lost Suitcase Delbanco ruminates on the life of the writer and the significance of language as art. The title novella, a stunningly crafted story that is the book's centerpiece, 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. The suitcase was stolen, and the loss was devastating for both of them as well as for their marriage. Did it also cause irreparable damage to Hemingway's career? Delbanco imagines this event and its main characters in numerous extremely inventive ways that make the narrative itself a comment on creativity, fiction, and a writer's self-awareness. In the eight reflections that surround and frame the novella, Delbanco contemplates various aspects of his craft. From the pleasure of travel writing to the travails of historical fiction, from the question of artistic judgment to that question put to the author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon ("Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh, Mr. Gibbon?")-Delbanco ranges far and wide through the literary landscape. By turns descriptive and prescriptive, he explores how literary virtuosity is achieved, how the writing of fiction can be taught, and the way literature functions for writer and reader equally. He reflects on his own history, his family, the standards of judgment and progress, and the ways we remember and revise what has happened to us. "Fiction is a web of lies that attempts to entangle the truth. And autobiography may well be the reverse: data tricked up and rearranged to invent a fictive self." In both form and content, The Lost Suitcase is a tradition-steeped meditation on literary art and an original foray into the world of words.
£22.50
Dalkey Archive Press It Is Enough
“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.
£12.99
Mandel Vilar Press Still Life at Eighty
£16.57
Columbia University Press Anywhere out of the World: Essays on Travel, Writing, Death
Nicholas Delbanco-who, John Updike says, "wrestles with the abundance of his gifts as a novelist the way other men wrestle with their deficiencies"-ventures forth to discover and illuminate various writers and places. In this follow-up to his acclaimed The Lost Suitcase, Delbanco weaves varied reflections to reveal a singular 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, Delbanco conveys the wonder and the apprehension of visiting new places. However, he goes beyond commonplace travelogues, examining our desire to travel and to write and read about distant lands. In the title essay, which surveys the state of travel and travel writing in a world that has grown smaller and less strange, he explores the continuing allure of new locales and the ways in which familiar places change in our imagination over time. Delbanco's reflections on literature look to past writers and literary traditions as a way of enriching the present. Delbanco begins by asking us to reconsider society's infatuation with novelty and proposes the paradoxical notion of imitation as a source of originality. Remembering his friendships with two colorful departed figures, John Gardner and James Baldwin, and celebrating the now somewhat-and regrettably-neglected works of John Fowles and Ford Madox Ford, he pays tribute to these writers' generosity of spirit and commitment to literature. In "Strange Type," Delbanco explores his own recent brush with death. Here too, he draws on a range of subjects and reflections, describing his recovery from heart problems via a poem by Malcolm Lowry, the surprising persistence of typos despite advances in word-processing technology, and Ernest Hemingway as literary celebrity.
£31.50
Yale University Press Why Writing Matters
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.
£13.60
Dalkey Archive Press Sherbrookes: Possession / Sherbrookes / Stillness
The collected early novels of an American master.
£14.99
Dalkey Archive Press Count of Concord
Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, was—as Nicholas Delbanco writes—“world famous in his lifetime,” yet now he has been “almost wholly forgotten.” Like Delbanco himself, Sally Ormsby Thompson Robinson—the narrator of this novel and the Count’s fictional, last-surviving relative—is “haunted” by one of history’s most fascinating and remarkable figures. On par with Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, Count Rumford was, among many other things, a politician, a spy, a philanthropist, and above all, a scientist. Based on countless historical documents, including letters and essays by Thompson himself, The Count of Concord brings to life the remarkable career of Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford.
£14.65
The New York Review of Books, Inc The Enormous Room
£15.99
Columbia University Press Talking Horse: Bernard Malamud on Life and Work
-- Publishers Weekly
£93.37