Don DeLillo

The National Book Award-winning classic by the author of Underworld and Libra, featuring an introduction by Richard Powers, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory and Playground Now a major motion picture starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig White Noise tells 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 appliances, and TV murmurings--pulsing with life, yet suggesting something ominous. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

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. 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.

Prosperous, good-looking and empty inside, 28-year-old advertising executive David Bell appears on the surface to have everything. But he is a man on the brink of losing his sanity. Trapped in a Manhattan office with soulless sycophants as his only company, he makes an abrupt decision to leave New York for America's mid-west.

An unparalleled work of historical conjecture, ranging imaginatively over huge tracts of the American popular consciousness, Don DeLillo's Libra contains an introduction by the author in Penguin Modern Classics. In this powerful, eerily convincing fictional speculation on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, 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 JFK will galvanize the nation against Communism, the scales are irrevocably tipped. Don DeLillo (b.1936) was born and raised in New York City. Americana (1971), his first novel, announced the arrival of a major literary talent, and the novels that followed confirmed his reputation as one of the most distinctive and compelling voices in late-twentieth-century American fiction. DeLillo's comic gifts come to the fore in White Noise (1985), which won the National Book Award, Underworld (1997), hailed by Martin Amis as 'the ascension of a great writer', Cosmopolis (2003), adapted into a film by David Cronenberg, due to be released later this year, and Falling Man (2007), a novel about the aftereffects of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York. If you enjoyed Libra, you might like DeLillo's Americana, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.'Don DeLillo's apocalyptic imagination takes on the assassination of John F. Kennedy... Breathtaking' Newsday

"Love-Lies-Bleeding," Don DeLillo's third play, is a daring, profoundly compassionate story about life, death, art and human connection. Three people gather to determine the fate of the man who sits in a straight-backed chair saying nothing. He is Alex Macklin, who gave up easel painting to do land art in the southwestern desert, and he is seventy now, helpless in the wake of a second stroke. The people around him are the bearers of a complicated love, his son, his young wife, the older woman -- his wife of years past -- who feels the emotional tenacity of a love long-ended. It is their question to answer. When does life end, and when should it end? In this remote setting, without seeking medical or legal guidance, they move unsteadily toward last things. Luminous, spare, unnervingly comic and always deeply moving, "Love-Lies-Bleeding" explores a number of perilous questions about the value of life and how we measure it.

In Valparaiso, a breathtaking play from Don DeLillo, a man sets out on what he imagines will be an ordinary business trip to Valparaiso, Indiana. It proves to be anything but run-of-the-mill, turning instead into a mock-heroic journey toward identity and transcendence. Valparaiso is a funny, sharp and deeply satirical look at our information age. This is the way we talk to each other today. This is the way we tell each other things, in public, before listening millions, that we don't dare say privately. Nothing is allowed to be unseen. Nothing remains unread. And everything melts repeatedly into something else, as if driven by the finger on the TV remote. This is also a play that makes obsessive poetry out of the language of routine airline announcements and the flow of endless information.

A brilliant billionaire asset manager, en route via white stretch limo to the local haircutter, finds his trip interrupted by a presidential motorcade, music idol's funeral, movie set, and violent political demonstration, and receives a number of important visitors in the fields of security, technology, currency, finance, and theory. Reprint. 75,000 first printing.

Yhden päivän aikana yhdellä Manhattanin kadulla tapahtuva Cosmopolis on ainutlaatuinen ja unohtumaton romaani, jossa kiteytyy se mikä on ajassamme olennaisinta 28-vuotias Eric Packer lähtee 104 miljoonan dollarin kattohuoneistostaan ja asettuu ylellisesti varustettuun valkoiseen limusiiniinsa. Tänä huhtikuun päivänä vuonna 2000 hänellä on edessään kaksi tehtävää: käydä toivotonta kauppaa jenillä ja leikkuuttaa tukkansa toisella puolen kaupunkia. Ericin matka parturiin on todellinen tämän päivän odysseia. Matkan keskeyttää presidentin autosaattue, pop-idolin hautajaiset, elokuvan kuvaus ja raju mielenosoitus. Autossa käy vieras toisensa perään: turvallisuuden, tekniikan, terveyden ja rahoituksen asiantuntijoita. Välillä Eric lähtee autosta intiimiin tapaamiseen, välillä hänen ei tarvitse lähteä. Cosmopolis on värikäs ja vauhdikas romaani. DeLillon näkemys rahan kaikinpuolisesta vaikutuksesta kulttuuriimme on hätkähdyttävä. Ja Eric Packer on myötätuntoa herättävä päähenkilö, joka tajuaa oman inhimillisyytensä liian myöhään.

Der Autor schildert den Gegensatz von Individuum und Masse, von Gewalt und Kreativität. Im Mittelpunkt der Handlung steht ein berühmter Schriftsteller, der von New York in den Libanon reist, um sich für die Freilassung einer politischen Geisel einzusetzen. Er gerät in ein aberwitziges Spiel auf Leben und Tod.

The play opens in a hospital; the characters are patients, doctors and nurses. It is a recognizable, predictable world. And yet, as the scenes unfold – in dialogue crackling with intelligence and insight, with incandescent bite and humour – our sense of normalcy is rocked from under us. Are these doctors and nurses really just patients from the Arno Klein Psychiatric Wing? Or are they something else entirely: people who are playing psychiatric patients playing doctors and nurses? And who, exactly, is Arno Klein? Described by the Boston Globe on its first performance as ‘an unselfconscious, fizzing, inventive black comedy that is enormously funny’, The Day Room displays Don DeLillo’s extraordinary talents in the brightest of lights.

The National Book Award-winning classic from the author of Underworld and Libra, soon to be a major motion picture starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig White Noise is the story of Jack, his wife, Babette, and their four ultramodern offspring. They live in a college town where Jack is Professor of Hitler Studies (and conceals the fact that he does not speak a word of German), and Babette teaches posture and volunteers by reading tabloids to a group of elderly shut-ins. They are happy enough, until a deadly toxic accident and Babette's addiction to an experimental drug make Jake question everything. White Noise is considered a postmodern classic and its unfolding of themes of consumerism, family and divorce, and technology as a deadly threat have attracted the attention of literary scholars since its publication. This Viking Critical Library edition, prepared by scholar Mark Osteen, is the only edition of White Noise that contains the entire text along with an extensive critical apparatus, including a critical introduction, selected essays on the author, the work, and its themes, reviews, a chronology of DeLillo's life and work, a list of discussion topics, and a selected bibliography.

"DeLillo's most affecting novel yet... A dazzling, phosphorescent work of art."--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times"The clearest vision yet of what it felt like to live through that day." --Malcolm Jones, Newsweek"A metaphysical ghost story about a woman alone...intimate, spare, exquisite." --Adam Begley, The New York Times Book Review"A brilliant new novel.... Don DeLillo continues to think about the modern world in language and images as quizzically beautiful as any writer." -- San Francisco Chronicle

Opens at the Shea Stadium at the World Series Game of 1951, where the ball is caught by a young, black man in the crowd, and continues to change hands throughout the book. The various recipients of the ball tell the story of post-war US history giving a panorama of America from the 50s to the 90s.

From the author of the National Book Award-winning White Noise comes a novel that "reflects our era's nightmares and hallucinations with all appropriate lurid, tawdry shades" (The Cleveland Plain Dealer)A thought-provoking exploration of the alluring yet hollow world of rock and roll stardom. 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 bolds from his band mid-tour to hole up in a dingy East Village apartment, where he breaks away from his manufactured persona and separates himself from the toxic and superficial culture he has helped create. As faithful fans await messages, Bucky encounters every sort of roiling farce he is trying to escape. Don DeLillo's Great Jones Street is a penetrating look at rock and roll's merger of art, commerce, and urban decay through a vivid portrait of a troubled rock star's search for meaning beyond the glitz and glamor.

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.

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

"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 the National Book Award-winning White Noise At twenty-eight, David Bell is living the American Dream. He has fought his way to the top, becoming a top television executive who has captivated America's imagination through the images on their flickering screens. At the height of his success, David becomes disillusioned with the realities of consumerism and mass media and sets out to rediscover reality--and himself. Camera in hand, he journeys across the country in a mad and moving attempt to capture and find meaning in America's past, present, and future. Don DeLillo delivers a witty and incisive examination of Amerca's cultural heritage and the complexities of identity in this classic work of postmodernist literary fiction.

"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

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 star in the modern master's early career.

The second novel by Don DeLillo, author of White Noise (winner of the National Book Award) and The SilenceAt 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 players, the terminologies of football and nuclear war--the language of end zones--become interchangeable, and their meaning deteriorates as the collegiate year runs its course. In this triumphantly funny, deeply searching novel, Don DeLillo explores the metaphor of football as war with rich, original zeal.