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.

This collection of essays does not intend to teach its readers to write, nor does it attempt to convince them to take up the pen. Rather, in their respective essays, writers William Kennedy, Robert Hass, Richard Ford, Roger Rosenblatt, Geoffrey Wolff, Diane Johnson, Louise Gluck, Philip Levine, and John Barth tell us why literature matters, why it is remarkable to actively take part in advancing one's culture by writing. This volume contributes not only to our understanding of writers and their works, but also to our understanding of the culture in which we live. The essays illustrate how each of our own stories develop, how they become intertwined, how culture itself is created and perpetuated simply by the act of writing such stories.
Originally part of the Hopwood Lecture series at the University of Michigan, these essays were presented in conjunction with the annual awarding of the Hopwood Prizes in creative writing. The internationally recognized awards are granted by the bequest of playwright Avery Hopwood (1884-1928), who sought to encourage student work in the fields of dramatic writing, fiction, poetry, and the essay.
The volume is edited and introduced by Nicholas Delbanco, Robert Frost Collegiate Professor of English Language and Literature and Chair of the Hopwood Awards Committee, University of Michigan. He is also a novelist and author of seventeen books.

Essays on the art and craft of writing by some of the nation's finest writers make up this rich collection, from Louise Bogan's meditation on popular and unpopular poetry, to Saul Bellow's assessment of the future of fiction, to Francie du Plessix Gray's reflection on women and Russian literature. Spanning five decades of writing, the essays address topics both timely and timeless in nature, and cover both the process and the product of writing. These essays were originally presented at the Hopwood Lecture series at the University of Michigan in conjunction with the annual awarding of the Hopwood Prizes in creative writing. The internationally recognized awards are granted by the bequest of playwright Avery Hopwood (1884-1928), who sought to encourage student work in the fields of dramatic writing, fiction, poetry, and the essay. The essays speak to the apprentice writer, finding their focus in a twinned discussion of the craft of prose and the art of poetry. The authors share an assumption that literature matters, and vitally, to the culture it reports on and sustains.

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.

"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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.