The New Yorker (Free subscription) | 11/23/2009
We were two sombre boys hunched in our coats, grim winter settling in. The college was at the edge of a small town way upstate, barely a town, maybe a hamlet, we said, or just a whistle stop, and we took walks all the time, getting out, going nowhere, low . . .
Christian Science Monitor (Free subscription) | 11/22/2009
[This review from the Monitor's archives originally ran on Sept. 12, 1988.] The plot of Libra, Don DeLillo's ninth novel, is the plot that led to the assassination of John F. Kennedy that Friday in November almost 25 years ago. Not that DeLillo claims to have unearthed the "real'' plot, ...
The Guardian Books Blog (Free subscription) | 11/19/2009
It was the year of Atonement, Body Artist and The Corrections, but what was your favourite book from 2001? It was the year our era began, with unprecedented abruptness, in obscene rolling news. But, blessedly, literature moves at a much slower pace, and it would be some years before the convulsions of September 2001 began to resound in serious fiction. Saturday, Ian McEwan's post-9/11 novel, was four...
The Guardian Books Blog (Free subscription) | 11/18/2009
She's been a brilliant writer since her 20s, and her remarkably versatile work continues to dazzle and innovate I believe that most writers get better as they get older. Unlike, say, rock musicians, exploding in a star-burst of youthful inspiration, novelists take their time. They grow into and with the act of writing; over decades, over thousands of hours and millions of words. One of my favourites,...
In Memory of Our Feelings (Free subscription) | 11/11/2009
from Don DeLillo's The Names "I began to think of myself as a perennial tourist. There was something agreeable about this. To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don't clin to you the way they do back home. You're able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity. You're expect to be stupid. The...
Tom Conoboy's Writing Blog (Free subscription) | 11/10/2009
While characters must act in recognisable and credible ways, it is nonetheless a precarious pastime to criticise a novel based solely on the actions of its protagonists. ‘So and so just wouldn’t have done that,’ is a common enough comment in criticisms of fiction but, it seems to me, the inherent certainty of such a stance leads to the peculiar outcome whereby a reader’s understanding...
Indian Express (Free subscription) | 11/07/2009
In Granta's special issue on Chicago, Don DeLillo, he who chronicled New York's underbelly in Underworld, pays warm tribute to Nelson Algren.
clusterflock (Free subscription) | 11/07/2009
All plots, as Don DeLillo memorably put it, end in death. Moreover, en route to their respective endgames, both chess and the novel offer powerful arenas in which to investigate the question of questions: the ever-vexatious issue of the relationship between fate and agency, between necessity and freedom. Every move is our own, except when [...]
Tom Conoboy's Writing Blog (Free subscription) | 11/07/2009
From Don DeLillo's Mao II : Bill was not a list-making novelist. He thought sentences lost their heft and edge when they were stretched too far and he didn't seem to find the slightest primal joy in world-naming or enumerating, in penetrating the relatedness of thngs or words, those breathy sentences that beat with new exuberance. I'm inclined to agree. I find lists fairly dull, on the whole. Those...
LisNews (Free subscription) | 11/07/2009
Read Me: A Century of Classic American Book Advertisements This witty and heavily illustrated volume features more than 300 vintage book advertisements—startling and strange, beautiful and funny—that together reveal a kind of secret history of American literature over the last century. New York Times book critic Dwight Garner brings together original ads for some of the most acclaimed...
<HTMLGIANT> (Free subscription) | 11/05/2009
Facebook keeps suggesting I become friends with “Don DeLillo.” I’d like that very much, of course, and yet I have yet to seriously consider pushing the little button to connect myself to whatever’s on the other end of the DD-fb page. Ah, but just for a second, imagine if it really was… Playing DD at [...]
Seattle Weekly (Free subscription) | 11/04/2009
Like Don DeLillo, Lydia Davis is as much sculptor as writer. “I put that word on the page, but he added the apostrophe,” reads the entirety of one recent story, “Collaboration With Fly.” Another, “My Mother's Reaction to My Travel Plans,” doesn't even stretch ...
<HTMLGIANT> (Free subscription) | 11/03/2009
Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there. On one level this truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it’s the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language. I’ve [...]
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 11/01/2009
Thanks to Jeff Stelling, and with a little help from Don DeLillo, football has become the new racing accumulator There is a great scene in Don DeLillo's White Noise about "THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA" – a barn which is impossible to see for yourself because of all the people taking pictures of it and the people taking pictures of the people taking pictures of it and the people...
ENCYCLOPEDIA HANASIANA (Free subscription) | 10/30/2009
You always hear that Don DeLillo worked in advertising before he became a writer, but you never hear if he was any good at it--or about what happened on his last day. Did he give the appropriate notice? Did the office manager circulate a card in a manila envelope with "For Don DeLillo" written on the tab, and if so, what was the title of the highest ranking company offical who signed it?...
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