Download or read book Libra written by Don DeLillo and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1991-05-01 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of White Noise (winner of the National Book Award) and The Silence, an eerily convincing fictional speculation on the events leading up to the assassination of John F. Kennedy In this powerful, unsettling novel, Don DeLillo chronicles Lee Harvey Oswald's odyssey from troubled teenager to a man of precarious stability who imagines himself an agent of history. When "history" presents itself in the form of two disgruntled CIA operatives who decide that an unsuccessful attempt on the life of the president will galvanize the nation against communism, the scales are irrevocably tipped. A gripping, masterful blend of fact and fiction, alive with meticulously portrayed characters both real and created, Libra is a grave, haunting, and brilliant examination of an event that has become an indelible part of the American psyche.
Download or read book The Silence written by Don DeLillo and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-10-20 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the National Book Award–winning author of Underworld, a “daring…provocative…exquisite” (The Washington Post) novel about five people gathered together in a Manhattan apartment, in the midst of a catastrophic event. It is Super Bowl Sunday in the year 2022. Five people, dinner, an apartment on the east side of Manhattan. The retired physics professor and her husband and her former student waiting for the couple who will join them from what becomes a dramatic flight from Paris. The conversation ranges from a survey telescope in North-central Chile to a favorite brand of bourbon to Einstein’s 1912 Manuscript on the Special Theory of Relativity. Then something happens and the digital connections that have transformed our lives are severed. What follows is a “brilliant and astonishing…masterpiece” (Chicago Tribune) about what makes us human. Don DeLillo completed this novel just weeks before the advent of the Covid pandemic. His language, the dazzle of his sentences offer a kind of solace in our bewildering world. “DeLillo’s shrewd, darkly comic observations about the extravagance and alienation of contemporary life can still slice like a scalpel” (Entertainment Weekly). “In this wry and cutting meditation on collective loss, a rupture severs us, suddenly, from everything we’ve come to rely on. The Silence seems to absorb DeLillo’s entire body of work and sand it into stone or crystal.” —Rachel Kushner
Download or read book White Noise written by Don DeLillo and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1999-06-01 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant satire of mass culture and the numbing effects of technology, White Noise tells the story of Jack Gladney, a teacher of Hitler studies at a liberal arts college in Middle America. Jack and his fourth wife, Babette, bound by their love, fear of death, and four ultramodern offspring, navigate the rocky passages of family life to the background babble of brand-name consumerism. Then a lethal black chemical cloud, unleashed by an industrial accident, floats over there lives, an "airborne toxic event" that is a more urgent and visible version of the white noise engulfing the Gladneys—the radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, and TV murmurings that constitute the music of American magic and dread.
Download or read book Falling Man written by Don DeLillo and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-05-15 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is September 11 and then there are the days after, and finally the years. Falling Man is a magnificent, essential novel about the event that defines turn-of-the-century America. It begins in the smoke and ash of the burning towers and tracks the aftermath of this global tremor in the intimate lives of a few people. First there is Keith, walking out of the rubble into a life that he'd always imagined belonged to everyone but him. Then Lianne, his es-tranged wife, memory-haunted, trying to reconcile two versions of the same shadowy man. And their small son Justin, standing at the window, scanning the sky for more planes. These are lives choreographed by loss, grief and the enormous force of history. Brave and brilliant, Falling Man traces the way the events of September 11 have reconfigured our emotional landscape, our memory and our perception of the world. It is cathartic, beautiful, heartbreaking.
Download or read book Zero K written by Don DeLillo and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-05-03 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book A New York Times bestseller, “DeLillo’s haunting new novel, Zero K—his most persuasive since his astonishing 1997 masterpiece, Underworld” (The New York Times), is a meditation on death and an embrace of life. Jeffrey Lockhart’s father, Ross, is a billionaire in his sixties, with a younger wife, Artis Martineau, whose health is failing. Ross is the primary investor in a remote and secret compound where death is exquisitely controlled and bodies are preserved until a future time when biomedical advances and new technologies can return them to a life of transcendent promise. Jeff joins Ross and Artis at the compound to say “an uncertain farewell” to her as she surrenders her body. “We are born without choosing to be. Should we have to die in the same manner? Isn’t it a human glory to refuse to accept a certain fate?” These are the questions that haunt the novel and its memorable characters, and it is Ross Lockhart, most particularly, who feels a deep need to enter another dimension and awake to a new world. For his son, this is indefensible. Jeff, the book’s narrator, is committed to living, to experiencing “the mingled astonishments of our time, here, on earth.” Don DeLillo’s “daring…provocative…exquisite” (The Washington Post) new novel weighs the darkness of the world—terrorism, floods, fires, famine, plague—against the beauty and humanity of everyday life; love, awe, “the intimate touch of earth and sun.” “One of the most mysterious, emotionally moving, and rewarding books of DeLillo’s long career” (The New York Times Book Review), Zero K is a glorious, soulful novel from one of the great writers of our time.
Download or read book Cosmopolis written by Don DeLillo and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2003 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eric Packer, a young billionaire asset manager, journeys across New York in his limousine despite a threat against his life, and the occurances of various events that are stalling traffic throughout the city.
Download or read book Mao II written by Don DeLillo and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1992-05-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD • A profound novel about art, terror, masses, and the individual, from the National Book Award–winning author of White Noise, “one of the most ironic, intelligent, grimly funny voices to comment on life in present-day America” (The New York Times) “This novel’s a beauty. A vision as bold and a voice as eloquent and morally focused as any in American writing.”—Thomas Pynchon Bill Gray, a famous, reclusive novelist, emerges from his isolation when he becomes the key figure in an event staged to force the release of a poet hostage in Beirut. As Bill enters the world of political violence, a nightscape of Semtex explosives and hostages locked in basement rooms, his dangerous passage leaves two people stranded: his brilliant, fixated assistant, Scott, and the strange young woman who is Scott’s lover—and Bill’s. An extraordinary novel about words and images, novelists and terrorists, the mass mind and the arch-individualist, Mao II is the work of an ingenious writer at the height of his powers.
Download or read book Conversations with Don DeLillo written by Don DeLillo and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2005 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout long profiles and conversations--ranging from 1982 to 2001--the renowned author makes clear his distinctions between historical fact and his own creative leaps
Download or read book Don DeLillo In Context written by Jesse Kavadlo and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-06-02 with total page 604 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Don DeLillo is one of the most important novelists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Yet despite DeLillo's prolific output and scholarly recognition, much of the attention has gone to his works individually, rather than collectively or thematically. This volume provides separate entries into the wide variety and categories of contexts that surround and help illuminate DeLillo's writings. Don DeLillo in Context examines how geography, biography, history, media studies, culture, philosophy, and the writing process provide critical frameworks and ways of reading and understanding DeLillo's prodigious body of work.
Download or read book The Names written by Don DeLillo and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-04-11 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set against the backdrop of a lush and exotic Greece, The Names is considered the book which began to drive "sharply upward the size of his readership" (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Among the cast of DeLillo's bizarre yet fully realized characters in The Names are Kathryn, the narrator's estranged wife; their son, the six-year-old novelist; Owen, the scientist; and the neurotic narrator obsessed with his own neuroses. A thriller, a mystery, and still a moving examination of family, loss, and the amorphous and magical potential of language itself, The Names stands with any of DeLillo's more recent and highly acclaimed works. "The Names not only accurately reflects a portion of our contemporary world but, more importantly, creates an original world of its own."--Chicago Sun-Times "DeLillo sifts experience through simultaneous grids of science and poetry, analysis and clear sight, to make a high-wire prose that is voluptuously stark."--Village Voice Literary Supplement "DeLillo verbally examines every state of consciousness from eroticism to tourism, from the idea of America as conceived by the rest of the world to the idea of the rest of the world as conceived by America, from mysticism to fanaticism."--New York Times
Download or read book Introducing Don DeLillo written by Frank Lentricchia and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1991-01-11 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book was originally published as an issue of South Atlantic Quarterly. Beginning with an introduction by Lentricchia, the volume covers every significant element of DeLillo's art, and describes the social and intellectual context in which DeLillo's writings must be understood. It includes general essays on the novelist's work by Daniel Aaron, Hal Crowther, John A. McClure, and Eugene Goodheart and detailed analyses of individual works by Anthony DeCurtis, Charles Molesworth, Dennis A. Foster, and John Frow. The volume reprints Anthony DeCurtis' insightful interview with DeLillo that originally appeared in Rolling Stone, and includes Chapter 10 of DeLillo's Ratner's Star as an example of the author's wit, verbal pyrotechnics, and thematic concerns. ISBN 0-8223-1135-6: $29.95.
Download or read book Americana written by Don DeLillo and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1989-07-06 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “DeLillo’s swift, ironic, and witty cross-country American nightmare doesn't have a dull or an unoriginal line.”—Rolling Stone The first novel by Don DeLillo, author of White Noise (winner of the National Book Award) and The Silence At twenty-eight, David Bell is the American Dream come true. He has fought his way to the top, surviving office purges and scandals to become a top television executive. David’s world is made up of the images that flicker across America’s screens, the fantasies that enthrall America's imagination. When, at the height of his success, the dream (and the dream-making) become a nightmare, David sets out to rediscover reality. Camera in hand, he journeys across the country in a mad and moving attempt to capture and to impose a pattern on America’s—and his own—past, present, and future.
Download or read book Ratner s Star written by Don DeLillo and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-04-11 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A whimsical, surrealistic excursion into the modern scientific mind." --The New Yorker One of DeLillo's first novels, Ratner's Star follows Billy, the genius adolescent, who is recruited to live in obscurity, underground, as he tries to help a panel of estranged, demented, and yet lovable scientists communicate with beings from outer space. It is a mix of quirky humor, science, mathematical theories, as well as the complex emotional distance and sadness people feel. Ratner's Star demonstrates both the thematic and prosaic muscularity that typifies DeLillo's later and more recent works, like The Names (which is also available in Vintage Contemporaries). "His most spectacularly inventive novel." --The New York Times
Download or read book Players written by Don DeLillo and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-03-28 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Players DeLillo explores the dark side of contemporary affluence and its discontents. Pammy and Lyle Wynant are an attractive, modern couple who seem to have it all. Yet behind their "ideal" life is a lingering boredom and quiet desperation: their talk is mostly chatter, their sex life more a matter of obligatory "satisfaction" than pleasure. Then Lyle sees a man killed on the floor of the Stock Exchange and becomes involved with the terrorists responsible; Pammy leaves for Maine with a homosexual couple.... And still they remain untouched, "players" indifferent to the violence that surrounds them, and that they have helped to create. Originally published in 1977 (before his National Book Award-winning White Noise and the recent blockbuster Underworld), Players is a fast-moving yet starkly drawn socially critical drama that demonstrates the razor-sharp prose and thematic density for which DeLillo is renowned today. "The wit, elegance and economy of Don DeLillo's art are equal to the bitter clarity of his perceptions."--New York Times Book Review
Download or read book Great Jones Street written by Don DeLillo and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1994-01-01 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of White Noise (winner of the National Book Award) and The Silence, a novel that “reflects our era’s nightmares and hallucinations with all appropriate lurid, tawdry shades” (The Cleveland Plain Dealer) Bucky Wunderlick, rock star and budding messiah, has hit a spiritual wall. Unfulfilled by the excess of fame and fortune his revolutionary image has wrought, he bolts from his band mid-tour to hole up in a dingy East Village apartment and separate himself from the paranoid machine that propels the culture he has helped create. As faithful fans await messages, Bucky encounters every sort of roiling farce he is trying to escape. Great Jones Street is a penetrating look at rock and roll's merger of art, commerce and urban decay.
Download or read book Understanding Don DeLillo written by Henry Veggian and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2014-11-10 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Henry Veggian introduces readers to one of the most influential American writers of the last half- century. Winner of the National Book Award, American Book Award, and the first Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, Don Delillo is the author of short stories, screenplays, and fifteen novels including his breakthrough work White Noise (1985) and Pulitzer Prize finalists Mao II (1992) and Underworld (1998). Veggian traces the evolution of DeLillo’s work through the three phases of the author’s career as a fiction writer, from the experimental early novels, through the more substantial works of the mid-1980s and 1990s, into the “smaller” but newly innovative novels of the last decade. He guides readers to Delillo’s principal concerns—the tension between biography and anonymity, the blurred boundary between fiction and historical narrative, and the importance of literary authorship in opposition to various structures of power—and traces the evolution of his changing narrative techniques. Beginning with a brief biography, an introduction to reading strategies, and a survey of the major concepts and questions that inform writings about DeLillo’s work, Veggian proceeds chronologically through the major novels of the author’s career. His discussion summarizes complicated plots, reflects critical responses to the author’s work, and explains the literary tools used to fashion his characters, narrators, and events. In a concluding chapter, Veggian engages DeLillo’s notable examples of other modes, particularly the short story that, he shows, reveals important insights into his “modular” working method as well as the evolution of his novels.
Download or read book Underworld written by Don DeLillo and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-11-01 with total page 838 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize Finalist for the National Book Award Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award Winner of the Howell’s Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters One of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books “A great American novel, a masterpiece, a thrilling page-turner.” —San Francisco Chronicle *With a new preface by Don DeLillo on the 25th anniversary of publication* Don DeLillo's mesmerizing novel was a major bestseller when it was published in 1997 and was the most widely reviewed novel of the year. It opens with a legendary baseball game played between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants in 1951. The home run that won the game was called the Shot Heard Round the World, and was shadowed by the terrifying news that on the same day, Russia tested its first hydrogen bomb. Underworld then tells the story of Klara Sax and Nick Shay, and of a half century of American life during the Cold War and beyond. “A dazzling, phosphorescent work of art.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times “This is a novel that draws together baseball, the Bomb, J. Edgar Hoover, waste disposal, drugs, gangs, Vietnam, fathers and sons, comic Lenny Bruce and the Cuban Missile Crisis. It also depicts passionate adultery, weapons testing, the care of aging mothers, the postwar Bronx, '60s civil rights demonstrations, advertising, graffiti artists at work, Catholic education, chess and murder. There's a viewing of a lost Eisenstein film, meditations on the Watts Tower, an evening at Truman Capote's Black & White Ball, a hot-air balloon ride, serial murders in Texas, a camping trip in the Southwest, a nun on the Internet, reflections on history, one hit (or possibly two) by the New York mob and an apparent miracle. As DeLillo says and proves, ‘Everything is connected in the end.’" —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Book World “Underworld is an amazing performance, a novel that encompasses some five decades of history, both the hard, bright world of public events and the more subterranean world of private emotions. It is the story of one man, one family, but it is also the story of what happened to America in the second half of the 20th century.” —The New York Times “Astonishing…A benchmark of twentieth-century fiction, Underworld is stunningly beautiful in its generous humanity, locating the true power of history not in tyranny, collective political movements or history books, but inside each of us.” —Greg Burkman, The Seattle Times “It’s hard to imagine a way people might better understand American life in the second half of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first than by reading Don DeLillo. The scale of his inquiry is global and historic… His work is astounding, made of stealthy blessings… it proves to my generation of writers that fiction can still do anything it wants.” —Jennifer Egan, in her presentation of the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters “Underworld is a page-turner and a masterwork, a sublime novel and a delight to read.” —Joan Mellen, The Baltimore Sun
