Still Life at Eighty

“The Delbanco book I’ve been waiting and wanting to read for half my life. Bravo.”

—David Shields

“A life worth reading: Nicholas Delbanco does it again.”—James Carroll,

Novelist, critic, essayist, screenwriter, teacher, art aficionado, Delbanco glances backwards and forwards from the vantage point of his eightieth year. Describing the scores of houses he lived in– each a receptacle of memory of his literary friendships—writers, mentors, protégés, ghosts—with many writers of his time: James Baldwin, Grace Paley, Frederick Busch, Donald Barthelme, Russell Banks. Mary Ruefle, Mary Lee Settle, Mary Robison, John Ashbery, John Cheever, John Irving, and John Updike.