Description: The latest work by Nicholas Delbanco -- who, John Updike says, "wrestles with the abundance of his gifts as a novelist the way other men wrestle with their deficiencies" -- centers on "The Lost Suitcase", a stunningly crafted story that takes as its main conceit a famous anecdote about Hemingway's early work and how it came to be lost: 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. Tragically, the suitcase was stolen. 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 reflections that surround and frame the novella, Delbanco contemplates his craft. 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. "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".

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