Don DeLillo

Underworld: A Novel

Don DeLillo

• 1999 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
• 1998 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
• 1997 NBA–Fiction finalist
• 1997 NBCC–Fiction finalist
• Score: 24.49

Our lives, our half century.

Nick Shay and Klara Sax knew each other once, intimately, and they meet again in the American desert. He is trying to outdistance the crucial events of his early life, haunted by the hard logic of loss and by the echo of a gunshot in a basement room. She is an artist who has made a blood struggle for independence.

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…

Libra

Don DeLillo

• 1988 LATimes–Fiction finalist
• 1988 NBA–Fiction finalist
• 1988 NBCC–Fiction finalist
• Score: 18.38

In this powerful, eerily convincing fictional speculation on the assassination of 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 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…

Mao II

Don DeLillo

• 1992 PEN-faulkner winner
• 1992 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
• Score: 16.42

In MAO II, 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 when he gets the chance to aid a hostage trapped in a basement in war-torn Beirut, a nightscape of Semtex explosives. Gray’s dangerous departure leaves two people stranded: his brilliant, fixated assistant, Scott, and the strange young woman…

White Noise

Don DeLillo

• 1985 NBA–Fiction winner
• 1985 NBCC–Fiction finalist
• Score: 16.35

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 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 cloud floats over their lives, an airborne “toxic event,” an industrial accident. The menacing cloud is a more urgent and visible version of the “white…

The Body Artist

Don DeLillo

• 2001 JT Black-Fiction shortlist
• Score: 6.51

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 the limits of the body. Lauren is living on a lonely coast, in a rambling rented house, where…