"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. Born in wartime into a large German Jewish family of successful art dealers who emigrated to New York, he completed his history of western art at 12 years old--a foretaste of well-received and better spelled books of fiction, essays, biography and criticism. Delbanco's birthday is time for a reckoning--and reckon he does. Scores of houses ("repositories of memory"); rollicking friendships with the major writers of his time; a family troupe of loving women. Altogether the book is a delight and an education, in its perusal of the stages of life and the wisdom that accrues. Not to mention the impeccable grace that has informed his every endeavor."--Lynn Sharon Schwartz, a celebrated author of award-winning novels include Rough Strife, Leaving Brooklyn and Disturbances in the Field. She lives in New York City and is currently faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars.

"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

"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, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead, Black Planet, and Other People: Takes & Mistakes

"Delbanco, like [Andre] Malraux, an excellent writer is among us, and if we neglect him....we shall have to apologize to posterity."--John Leonard, former New York Times Critic

"Let [this] writer loose in his own vineyard and he'll make astonishing wine."--Rosellen Brown, author of numerous novels including Tender Mercies, Before and After, and I am Homeless If This is Not My Home

"He may know more than just about anyone about the serious play that is literary life."--Lorrie Moore, novelist and short-story writer, author of numerous books including Birds of America and Anagrams