Download or read book The Countess of Stanlein Restored written by Nicholas Delbanco and published by Verso. This book was released on 2001 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Delbanco (English language and literature, U. of Michigan) traces the progression of the repair of the famous Stradivarius cello of 1707 that belongs to cellist Bernard Greenhouse. He also recounts the history of this outstanding instrument, which represents the highest standard of craftsmanship. As with other such instruments, it has been copied often, and physically analyzed, but never duplicated in quality. c. Book News Inc.
Download or read book Dear Wizard written by Nicholas Delbanco and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2014-10-17 with total page 751 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A belletristic personal correspondence and contest of extravagant and amusing letterhead
Download or read book The Vagabonds written by Nicholas Delbanco and published by Grand Central Publishing. This book was released on 2007-10-15 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It doesn't matter, really, if what we inherit is money or debt, a set of cats or cutlery or a portrait of grandfather Aaron. What matters is the way we deal with what's been left behind. The Vagabonds From critically acclaimed author Nicholas Delbanco comes a novel about a family with a mysterious inheritance and a secret tie to history... Born and raised in Saratoga Springs, New York, the three Saperstone siblings have drifted apart and lead very separate lives. On Cape Cod, Joanna manages a B and B and a teenage daughter, feeling vulnerable and alone. In Ann Arbor, Claire flirts with becoming an interior decorator while coming to terms with a personal betrayal. And in Berkeley, David carves a niche as a Web designer-yet he yearns to be a painter. Suddenly, these middle-class and ordinary lives will come together again in an extraordinary way. The death of their proud, spirited mother draws the Saperstones home to the New York resort town of Saratoga Springs. Gathered again in the family's ramshackle cottage, they discover a stunning legacy from 1916. Almost a century ago, the legendary "Vagabonds"-captains of industry Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone, inventor Thomas Edison, and naturalist John Burroughs-came to this town during one of their road trip adventures. Here they encountered a beautiful young woman, whom they would burden with a scandalous secret and a dazzling windfall. Now, when decades later this inheritance comes to the three Saperstones, it will utterly transform them-not so much for the riches it brings, but for how it will reconfigure the past they share...and a future they had thought beyond their grasp. Arresting in its poignancy and indelibly original, The Vagabonds is a brilliant marriage of a truth stranger than fiction and a fiction filled with transcendent truth.
Download or read book 1 000 Books to Read Before You Die written by James Mustich and published by Workman Publishing. This book was released on 2018-10-02 with total page 961 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The ultimate literary bucket list.” —THE WASHINGTON POST Celebrate the pleasure of reading and the thrill of discovering new titles in an extraordinary book that’s as compulsively readable, entertaining, surprising, and enlightening as the 1,000-plus titles it recommends. Covering fiction, poetry, science and science fiction, memoir, travel writing, biography, children’s books, history, and more, 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die ranges across cultures and through time to offer an eclectic collection of works that each deserve to come with the recommendation, You have to read this. But it’s not a proscriptive list of the “great works”—rather, it’s a celebration of the glorious mosaic that is our literary heritage. Flip it open to any page and be transfixed by a fresh take on a very favorite book. Or come across a title you always meant to read and never got around to. Or, like browsing in the best kind of bookshop, stumble on a completely unknown author and work, and feel that tingle of discovery. There are classics, of course, and unexpected treasures, too. Lists to help pick and choose, like Offbeat Escapes, or A Long Climb, but What a View. And its alphabetical arrangement by author assures that surprises await on almost every turn of the page, with Cormac McCarthy and The Road next to Robert McCloskey and Make Way for Ducklings, Alice Walker next to Izaac Walton. There are nuts and bolts, too—best editions to read, other books by the author, “if you like this, you’ll like that” recommendations , and an interesting endnote of adaptations where appropriate. Add it all up, and in fact there are more than six thousand titles by nearly four thousand authors mentioned—a life-changing list for a lifetime of reading. “948 pages later, you still want more!” —THE WASHINGTON POST
Download or read book Sherbrookes written by Nicholas Delbanco and published by Deep Vellum Publishing. This book was released on 2011-08-25 with total page 575 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Count of Concord written by Nicholas Delbanco and published by Dalkey Archive Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fictional account of the life of eighteenth-century American physicist and inventor Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, as seen by his last surviving relative.
Download or read book Why Writing Matters written by Nicholas Delbanco and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Lastingness written by Nicholas Delbanco and published by Grand Central Publishing. This book was released on 2011-01-24 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Anywhere Out of the World written by Nicholas Delbanco and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: SDPL - A delightfully aimless, somewhat rueful collection of nineessays on places visited and friends lost. Novelist/memorist is a writer'swriter, always in search of a fresh story, turn of phrase, or book to read. A"Guide Bleu" for the literary armchair.
Download or read book The Art of Youth written by Nicholas Delbanco and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2013 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Portraits of three artistic prodigies who died young--Stephen Crane (writer), Dora Carrington (painter), and George Gershwin (composer)--that form the centerpiece of a beautiful and fascinating inquiry into creation, mortality, and the enigma of promise: What would they have done had they lived longer?
Download or read book History and Representation in Ford Madox Ford s Writings written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-10-18 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History and Representation in Ford Madox Ford’s Writings explores the idea of history across various genres: fiction, autobiography, books about places and cultures, criticism, and poetry. ‘I wanted the Novelist in fact to appear in his really proud position as historian of his own time’, wrote Ford. The twenty leading specialists assembled for this volume consider his writing about twentieth-century events, especially the First World War; and also his representations of the past, particularly in his fine trilogy about Henry VIII and Katharine Howard, The Fifth Queen. Ford’s provocative dealings with the relationship between fiction and history is shown to anticipate postmodern thinking about historiography and narrative. The collection includes essays by two acclaimed novelists, Nicholas Delbanco and Alan Judd, assessing Ford’s grasp of literary history, and his place in it.
Download or read book Stradivari s Genius written by Toby Faber and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-05-09 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “’Tis God gives skill, but not without men’s hands: He could not make Antonio Stradivari’s violins without Antonio.” –George Eliot Antonio Stradivari (1644—1737) was a perfectionist whose single-minded pursuit of excellence changed the world of music. In the course of his long career in the northern Italian city of Cremona, he created more than a thousand stringed instruments; approximately six hundred survive. In this fascinating book, Toby Faber traces the rich, multilayered stories of six of these peerless instruments–five violins and a cello–and the one towering artist who brought them into being. Blending history, biography, meticulous detective work, and an abiding passion for music, Faber embarks on an absorbing journey as he follows some of the most prized instruments of all time. Mysteries and unanswered questions proliferate from the outset–starting with the enigma of Antonio Stradivari himself. What made this apparently unsophisticated craftsman so special? Why were his techniques not maintained by his successors? How is it that even two and a half centuries after his death, no one has succeeded in matching the purity, depth, and delicacy of a Stradivarius? In Faber’s illuminating narrative, each of the six fabled instruments becomes a character in its own right–a living entity cherished by artists, bought and sold by princes and plutocrats, coveted, collected, hidden, lost, copied, and occasionally played by a musician whose skill matches its maker’s. Here is the fabulous Viotti, named for the virtuoso who enchanted all Paris in the 1780s, only to fall foul of the French Revolution. Paganini supposedly made a pact with the devil to transform the art of the violin–and by the end of his life he owned eleven Strads. Then there’s the Davidov cello, fashioned in 1712 and lovingly handed down through a succession of celebrated artists until, in the 1980s, it passed into the capable hands of Yo-Yo Ma. From the salons of Vienna to the concert halls of New York, from the breakthroughs of Beethoven’s last quartets to the first phonographic recordings, Faber unfolds a narrative magnificent in its range and brilliant in its detail. “A great violin is alive,” said Yehudi Menuhin of his own Stradivarius. In the pages of this book, Faber invites us to share the life, the passion, the intrigue, and the incomparable beauty of the world’s most marvelous stringed instruments.
Download or read book The Socialite Who Killed a Nazi with Her Bare Hands and 143 Other Fascinating People Who Died This Past Year written by William McDonald and published by Workman Publishing Company. This book was released on 2012-10-30 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Returning for its second year but reimagined in a new impulse format, with a new title, new cover, new mission, and new sensibility, here is The Socialite Who Killed a Nazi with Her Bare Hands, a pithier, quirkier collection of the 164 best page-turning obituaries from The New York Times. Written by top journalists, each story is a gem of a bio, a full life in miniature. There’s the famous: Steve Jobs, including the story of how he was reunited with a sister he never knew, the novelist Mona Simpson. And the almost famous: Ruth Stone, a poet who worked in relative obscurity until she won the National Book Award at the age of 87. The behind-the-scenes, like Arch West, inventor of the Dorito, who pulled America’s snacks out of the 1950s doldrums and created a $5-billion-a-year product, and the out-there, like self-styled anarchist and maverick artist (and real estate mogul and museum director) Bob Cassilly, who died at the controls of his bulldozer while building “Cementland” in St. Louis. And because of the chronological organization of the book, the stories, one next to the other, make for an addictive-as-salted-peanuts book: Mark O. Hatfield, the celebrated antiwar Republican senator from Oregon, next to Nancy Wake of the title, the impoverished New Zealander who grew up to become a high-society hostess and heroine of the French Resistance—the socialite who did, indeed, kill a Nazi with her bare hands.
Download or read book Swimming written by Joanna Hershon and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2009-11-11 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty years ago, Vivian Silver abandoned her dreams of travel to marry the mysterious Jeb Wheeler, seduced both by his unnerving charm and his acres of untamed New Hampshire land. The hand-built house and swimming pond become the center of the universe for their entire family. Lila, their youngest, is consumed with love for her two older brothers, Aaron and Jack, and remains blind to the simmering tension between them. For beneath the surface of their idyllic setting lies a depth of explosive feeling that none of them can control. Into this heated atmosphere glides Aaron’s girlfriend, Suzanne, whose presence is threatening, exciting; Lila thrills to the ominous quality of Aaron’s absolute adoration for this young woman. Before her visit is over, Suzanne will unleash the forces of rage between Aaron and Jack, compelling one brother to commit an act against the other that can never be taken back. A decade later, living in New York, Lila still searches for Aaron, who disappeared that night, and Suzanne, whose mystique still exerts a hold on her memory. For Lila to move past her family’ s tragedy, she must piece together what happened that fateful weekend–and recover the things lost down by the water–before she can at last let them go. A stunning literary novel that captures the lingering effects of longing and loss, Swimming is by turns a gripping family story, a heartbreaking coming of age journey, and a suspenseful psychological investigation into the meaning and limits of fidelity, identity, and intimacy. BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from Joanna Hershon's A Dual Inheritance.
Download or read book Running in Place written by Nicholas Delbanco and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2001-06-06 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Running in Place is a stunning evocation of Provencal culture and history. An acclaimed novelist and essayist, Nicholas Delbanco provides a vivid portrait of a paradise still pure but not immune to progress. A perfect book for anyone who loves the work of Peter Mayle and Frances Mayes. "As entertaining travel literature, [it] ranks with the richest of the genre."--Diane Manuel, The New York Times Book Review
Download or read book Stradivari written by Stewart Pollens and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-02-11 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A highly illustrated biography and study of Stradivari, the greatest violin maker, including colour photographs of his most famous instruments.
Download or read book Best American Essays written by Stephen Gould and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
