8 Best 「don delilo」 Books of 2024| Books Explorer
A finalist for the National Book Award, Don DeLillo’s most powerful and riveting novel—“a great American novel, a masterpiece, a thrilling page-turner” (San Francisco Chronicle)—Underworld is about the second half of the twentieth century in America and about two people, an artist and an executive, whose lives intertwine in New York in the fifties and again in the nineties.With cameo appearances by Lenny Bruce, J. Edgar Hoover, Bobby Thompson, Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason and Toots Shor, “this is DeLillo’s most affecting novel…a dazzling, phosphorescent work of art” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times).
This is the story of a college professor and his family whose small Midwestern town is evacuated after an industrial accident. . . . Jack Gladney is a professor of Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill.This is an America where no one is responsible or in control; all are receptors, receivers of stimuli, consumers. Some join Simuvac, which signs up local school children as volunteer victims in simulated evacuations. Gladney's wife, Babette, a low-key and adaptable faculty wife who reads tabloids to the blind and teaches senior citizens' classes in posture, is distinguished by her forgetfulness and her preoccupation with death.
"One of the most intelligent, grimly funny voices to comment on life in present-day America" (The New York Times), Don DeLillo presents an extraordinary new novel about words and images, novelists and terrorists, the mass mind and the arch-individualist. At the heart of the book is Bill Gray, a famous reclusive writer who escapes the failed novel he has been working on for many years and enters the world of political violence, a nightscape of Semtex explosives and hostages locked in basement rooms. Bill's dangerous passage leaves two people stranded: his brilliant, fixated assistant, Scott, and the strange young woman who is Scott's lover--and Bill's.Michiko KakutaniDisturbing, provocative and darkly comic, Mao II reads, at once, as a sociological meditation on the perils of contemporary society, and as a kind of new-wave thriller....The writing, as usual, is dazzling; the book's images, so radioactive that they glow afterward in our minds. -- New York Times
From one of the greatest writers of our time, his first collection of short stories, written between 1979 and 2011, chronicling-and foretelling-three decades of American lifeSet in Greece, the Caribbean, Manhattan, a white-collar prison and outer space, these nine stories are a mesmerizing introduction to Don DeLilloâs iconic voice, from the rich, startling, jazz-infused rhythms of his early work to the spare, distilled, monastic language of the later stories.In 'Creation,' a couple at the end of a cruise somewhere in the West Indies canât get off the island-flights canceled, unconfirmed reservations, a dysfunctional economy. In 'Human Moments in World War III,' two men orbiting the earth, charged with gathering intelligence and reporting to Colorado Command, hear the voices of American radio, from a half century earlier. In the title story, Sisters Edgar and Grace, nuns working the violent streets of the South Bronx, confirm the neighborhoodâs miracle, the apparition of a dead child, Esmeralda.Nuns, astronauts, athletes, terrorists and travelers, the characters in The Angel Esmeralda propel themselves into the world and define it. DeLilloâs sentences are instantly recognizable, as original as the splatter of Jackson Pollock or the luminous rectangles of Mark Rothko. These nine stories describe an extraordinary journey of one great writer whose prescience about world events and ear for American language changed the literary landscape.
in This Potent And Beautiful Novel, The Writer the New York Times calls “prophetic About Twenty-first-century America” Looks Into The Mind And Heart Of A Scholar Who Was Recruited To Help The Mili­tary Conceptualize The War. we See Richard Elster At The End Of His Service. He Has Retreated To The Desert, In Search Of Space And Geologic Time. There He Is Joined By A Filmmaker And By Elster’s Daughter Jessica—an “otherworldly” Woman From New York. The Three Of Them Build An Odd, Tender Intimacy, Something Like A Family. Then A Devastating Event Turns Detachment Into Colossal Grief, And It Is A Human Mys­tery That Haunts The Landscape Of Desert And Mind.the New York Times - Michiko Kakutanilike Many Of Mr. Delillo's Earlier Books, omega Is Preoccupied With Death And Dread And Paranoia, And Like Many Of Those Books, It Has An Ingenious Architecture That Gains Resonance In Retrospect.
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 estranged 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.The New York Times - Frank RichIf Underworld took its cues from the kinetic cinema of Eisenstein, Falling Man, up until its remarkable final sequence, is all oblique silences and enigmatic close-ups reminiscent of the domestic anomie of the New Wave. In DeLillo s hands, this is not at all limiting or prosaic. There s a method to the Resnais-like fogginess. The cumulative effect is devastating, as DeLillo in exquisite increments lowers the reader into an inexorable rendezvous with raw terror.