Best Selling Books by Don DeLillo

“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.

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • An “eerie, brilliant, and touching” (The New York Times) modern classic about mass culture and the numbing effects of technology. “Tremendously funny . . . A stunning performance from one of our most intelligent novelists.”—The New Republic The inspiration for the award-winning major motion picture starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig Jack Gladney teaches Hitler Studies at a liberal arts college in Middle America where his colleagues include New York expatriates who want to immerse themselves in “American magic and dread.” Jack and his fourth wife, Babette, bound by their love, fear of death, and four ultramodern offspring, navigate the usual rocky passages of family life to the background babble of brand-name consumerism. Then a lethal black chemical cloud floats over their lives, an “airborne toxic event” unleashed by an industrial accident. The menacing cloud is a more urgent and visible version of the “white noise” engulfing the Gladney family—radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, ultrasonic appliances, and TV murmurings—pulsing with life, yet suggesting something ominous.

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

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.

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

A New York Times Notable Book and 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.

A finalist for the National Book Award, Underworld is Don DeLillo’s most powerful and riveting novel—“a great American novel, a masterpiece, a thrilling page-turner” (San Francisco Chronicle). Underworld is a story of men and women together and apart, seen in deep, clear detail and in stadium-sized panoramas, shadowed throughout by the overarching conflict of the Cold War. It is a novel that accepts every challenge of these extraordinary times -- Don DeLillo''s greatest and most powerful work of fiction. Don DeLillo''s mesmerizing novel opens with a legendary baseball game played in New York in 1951. The glorious outcome -- the home run that wins the game is called the Shot Heard Round the World -- shades into the grim news that the Soviet Union has just tested an atomic bomb. 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).

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 life Set in Greece, the Caribbean, Manhattan, a white-collar prison and outer space, these nine stories are a mesmerizing introduction to Don DeLillo’s 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 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 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 neighborhood’s 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. DeLillo’s 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.

From the author of the National Book Award-winning novel White Noise comes 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.

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.

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.

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.

"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

A stunning novel by the bestselling National Book Award–winning author of White Noise and Underworld. 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. In The Body Artist his spare, seductive twelfth novel, he inhabits the muted world of Lauren Hartke, an artist whose work defies the limits of the body. Lauren is living on a lonely coast, in a rambling rented house, where she encounters a strange, ageless man, a man with uncanny knowledge of her own life. Together they begin a journey into the wilderness of time, love and human perception. The Body Artist is a haunting, beautiful and profoundly moving novel from one of the finest writers of our time.

A darkly funny satire of human nature and American college football, set against the backdrop of the Cold War, by the author of the National Book Award–winning novel White Noise 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, fueled by his fear of and fascination with nuclear conflict. As the line between football and nuclear warfare blurs, the actions of the players become unorthodox and even bizarre, reflecting the disconcerting reality of a world teetering on the brink of destruction. In this triumphantly funny, deeply searching novel, Don DeLillo explores the metaphor of football as war with rich, original zeal.

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

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.