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.

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.

Provence: Its magnificent landscape has inspired artists and writers for centuries. In this stunning evocation of Provencal culture and history, the critically lauded novelist and essayist Nicholas Delbanco captures both the immediacy of this changing region and the time-honored traditions of its past. Born in England during the Second World War, raised in America, Delbanco spent many of the most important periods of his life in Provence. Ensconced in a farmhouse deep in the Alpes-Maritimes, writing books, he developed lasting friendships with his neighbors, including expatriate novelist James Baldwin. His narrative deals with the stages of age-from his first, carefree visits and an early love affair to his transformation into the "solid citizen" who imitates his parents while guiding his children through the streets. In 1987 Delbanco returned to Provence with his family, planning "a sentimental journey to our early haunts. It is to be, I tell myself, a chance to travel with our daughters before we drift apart, a chance to share our past with them before it proves irrecoverable." With the mind of a historian and the eye of an artist, Delbanco gracefully weaves strands of Provencal life into scenes from his own past and present. In the precise, mellifluous language that prompted the Chicago Tribune Book World to call him "as fine a pure prose stylist as any writer living," Delbanco provides a personal record of one of the world's most fertile regions. He writes of the landscape of Petrarch and Laura, Cezanne and van Gogh, the Marquis de Sade and Albert Camus ("who made his home in Lourmarin because of the size of the sky"); of Provence's thirty-two winds; and of aristocrat and peasant, cave and vineyard, restaurant and gallery, coal stoves and mimosa, cars and climbing roses, stone walls and bittersweet-describing a paradise still pure, but not immune to progress. This book will bear comparison to Hemingway's account of France; it, too, is a moveable feast.

"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.

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.

"An impressive gathering of the late Malamud's essays, interviews, lectures and notes. . . . In addition to admirers of Malamud's fiction, this book should also be of considerable interest to aspiring writers, as Malamud is open and revealing about his own creative process, and consistently engaging in his often politicized and outspoken views on the artist's role in society".--PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

Designed to provide writers with insights into the way a master thinks about and practices his craft, this collection includes discussions of the novel, the short story, subject matter, work in progress, revision, and the Jewish experience. Malamud also discusses the responsibilities of the writer.

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.