Don DeLillo

The story of Jack Gladney, his fourth wife, Babette, and four ultramodern offspring as they navigate the rocky passages of family life to the background babble of brand-name consumerism. When an industrial accident unleashes an "airborne toxic event," a lethal black chemical cloud floats over their lives. The menacing cloud is a more urgent and visible version of the "white noise" engulfing the Gladneys-radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, ultrasonic...

"Jeff's father, Ross, a billionaire in his sixties with a younger wife, Artis, with failing health, is the primary investor in a secret, remote compound where death is controlled and bodies are preserved until biomedical and technological advances can return them to a life of promise causing all three to examine their views on life and death"--

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,...

For thirty years, since the publication of his first novel Americana Don DeLillo has lived in the skin of our times. He has found a voice for the forgotten souls who haunt the fringes of our culture and for its larger-than-life, real-life figures. His language is defiantly, radiantly American. Now, to a new century, he has brought The Body Artist In this spare, seductive novel, he inhabits the muted world of Lauren Hartke, an artist whose work defies...

Set in Greece, the Caribbean, Manhattan, a white-collar prison and outer space, this small masterpiece of short fiction is a mesmerizing introduction to Don DeLillo's iconic voice. In "Creation," a couple at the end of a cruise somewhere in the West Indies can't 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...

The second novel by Don DeLillo, author of White Noise and The Silence. At Logos College in West Texas, huge young men, vacuum-packed into shoulder pads and shiny helmets, play football with intense passion. During an uncharacteristic winning season, the perplexed and distracted running back Gary Harkness has periodic fits of nuclear glee, he is fueled and shielded by his fear of and fascination with nuclear conflict. Among oddly afflicted and recognizable...

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...

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,...

DeLillo's Running Dog, originally published in 1978, follows Moll Robbins, a New York City journalist trailing the activities of an influential senator. In the process, she is dragged into the black market world of erotica and shady, infatuated men, where a cat-and-mouse chase for an erotic film rumored to "star" Adolph Hitler leads to trickery, maneuvering, and bloodshed. With streamlined prose and a thriller's narrative pace, Running Dog is a bright...

This first volume in the Library of America Don DeLillo edition presents three indispensable novels from the 1980s, published here with new prefaces from the author. The Names (1982) was DeLillo's breakthrough novel, a book that, as he reflects here, spanned a "broader expanse" than his earlier novels. James Axton, a "risk analyst" tasked with assessing dangers for his corporate clients from terrorism and other forms of political upheaval, uncovers...