Description
About the Author
Nicholas Delbanco is the author of more than thirty works of fiction and non-fiction. At the University of Michigan –from which he retired as the Robert Frost Distinguished University Professor in English—he was Director of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program and, for twenty-five years, the Hopwood Awards. As the founding Director of the Bennington Summer Writing Workshops, he created the low-residency MFA program. Delbanco is a recipient of the J.S. Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and twice awarded the National Endowment for the Arts Grant in Prose Fiction. He has served as Chair of the Fiction Panel for the National Book Awards, and as a judge for the Pulitzer Prize. With his wife, Elena, he divides his time between Manhattan and Cape Cod.
Reviews
“John Updike once said that Nicholas Delbanco struggles with his strengths the way other writers struggle with their weaknesses. Delbanco’s strengths remain in full force in Still Life at Eighty, but the fluency, the self-reflexivity, the allusiveness and elusiveness, the wit are in service here to what feels like something new: in the face of mortality, a chastened and measured modesty and humility and melancholy. The Delbanco book I’ve been waiting and wanting to read for half my life. Bravo.” —David Shields, author of Reality Hunger, and The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead, Black Planet, and Other People: Takes & Mistakes
“It is fitting that Nicholas Delbanco, author of Lastingness: The Art of Old Age has demonstrated his own lastingness with this aptly titled, meditative memoir, an exquisite retrospective, on the occasion of his 80th birthday.” — Paul Theroux novelist and travel writer, author of numerous books, including the travelogue The Great Railway Bazaar (1975).
“Still Life at Eighty is a triumphant, wise, and elegant memoir that beautifully explores the experience of aging, the joy of life, the inevitability of its end, and Delbanco’s remarkably influential journey through the arts.” — Charles Johnson, author of Middle Passage, A National Book Award winner and MacArthur Fellow
“A life well lived, well remembered, supremely well written. Houses, family, books, fellow writers, mentors, protégés, ghosts – the wide-eyed younger self meets the wise man looking back with gratitude – gratitude absolute. A joy, an affirmation, a life worth reading: Nicholas Delbanco does it again.” —James Carroll, author of The Cloister
“Nowadays the word “memoir” can conjure up gruesome tales of abuse, crime, and poverty. Happily, Nicholas Delbanco’s backward look at age 80 is a welcome rarity: this richly gifted author has been blessed with a fortunate life…. Delbanco’s birthday is time for a reckoning … Scores of houses (“repositories of memory”); rollicking friendships with the major writers of his time; a family troupe of loving women.” –Lynn Sharon Schwartz, author of 29 books of fiction, essays and poetry including the celebrated novels, Disturbances in the Field and Leaving Brooklyn.
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.