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1.White Noise (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century) by: Don DeLillo June 01, 1999
Average Rating: >>More Details		List Price: $16.00 Off The Bookshelf's Price: $10.88 You Save: $5.12 (32%) Prices subject to change. Used Price: $5.84
It is rare that I have a reaction of violent dislike to a book, and even books that I do not especially like I can find something respectable or interesting about the text, but I hate this book. This is the sort of literature that gets first-year philosophy majors to cream themselves because it is oh-so-insightful and important, and allows all the armchair intellectuals of the world to feel a little bit more superior because they assume the cleverness of Delillo's writing is lost on lesser minds. This isn't a novel, it's an extended postmodern manifesto that exposes the philosophy for the empty, whiny system of nihilism that it is. This novel has no characters, only insufferable stereotypes who can't walk through a produce isle at the grocery store without disappearing up their butts with lengthy, ... Read More

2.Falling Man: A Novel by: Don DeLillo May 15, 2007
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I couldn't pick this up when it first came out. I listened to it recently on CD during a long drive and with each mile, I felt the growing weight and gravity, lived with the men and women grappling with the aftermath, after the planes. There is a phrase in "Falling Man" that covers lots of ground about what this book is about: "beyond the limits of safe understanding." I think that's what DeLillo challenged himself to do, to understand beyond where we normally search for comprehension about our world. The tone here is dispassionate, almost like a list of details. I heard echoes of Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried," that same gripping weight. The word "ash" comes back over and over and that's what we were all coated with, the emotional ash, the "organic shrapnel" that might not at ... Read More

3.Underworld: A Novel by: Don DeLillo July 09, 1998
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DeLillo's Underworld has some difficult aspects. It presents a history of a world in decline, as we follow (in rough shod fashion) the life of Nick Shay, a waste expert. DeLillo throws in snippets of times and other lives into the mix, for all too fleeting periods. Reading this book is maddening for all the unfinished stories. However, the total sum of its parts adds up to a great thesis. I have long wanted to read this book, but it took me a LONG time to read. Now I feel it has spoiled my reading to come. This is because DeLillo's writing is very masterful and intelligent and spare. I loved the theme - of the Cold War and the examination of the detritus of our (recent) times. Personally Nick's character did not resonate with me. There was the wrong kind of introspection and the most intriguing aspect ... Read More

4.White Noise: Text and Criticism (Viking Critical Library) by: Don DeLillo December 01, 1998
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Masterfully crafted novel. Expressive, satirical, explores postmodernity. Dark, confused story that's both enlightening and depressing.

5.Libra by: Don DeLillo November 02, 1991
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An old boys netw. left over from the Bay of Pigs fiasco (our own home grown freedom fighters invaded Cuba in April 1961) fantasizes on how to rekindle support for the Castro project: arrange for some non compis mentis to take a shot @the President & let the trail lead back to El Jefe. However, patsy Oswald doesn't know he's supposed to miss, & besides, he's already missed old racist Gen. Walker. Just once, he'd like to nail someone & be a hero. Delillo's Lee Harvey Oswald is desperate for some kind of recognition; after all, even his own brother wouldn't know him. Oswald's defected to the Soviet Union & returned to the States again. Despite all the high-falutin' chatter about bourgeois oppression & Marx, all old Lee wanted was a crowd to meet him @the airport. Even just leafing ... Read More

6.Mao II (Unabridged) by: Don DeLillo November 02, 1991
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When I try to imagine a Delillo novel, this is the kind of thing that I envision, characters flitting through jagged set pieces like shadows, locations fraught with quivering meaning, dialogue that sounds like people talking each other and knowing that and not caring, and strings holding the pieces together so tightly and so finely that you'll have run right through before you realize you've even been cut. It's the most elusive of all of his novels, at its best when it's setting a mood and sketching out the picture, hinting that the full image may be too much for us to bear. Right from the start it sets the tone, with the mass wedding, a supposedly joyous event reduced to something mechanical and faceless, watched over with nothing more than a spiralling despair. The central focus of the novel is on reclusive writer Bill ... Read More

7.Cosmopolis by: Don DeLillo January 07, 2004
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I take Packer as a stand-in for capitalism gone wild and savage. There was a line in there somewhere about how the logical conclusion of capitalism is killing. Packer's rapacious and deliberate murder of the world's currencies in one day's time leads him logically to seek the assassin who's been stalking him (a former employee). The two wax philosophically about each other's personality deficits, a bumbling last rites.

8.The Names by: Don DeLillo July 17, 1989
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Though it seems to go against popular opinion, this is my favorite of all of Delillo's books. The language (and the meta-obsession with language) rings most true here. All choices seem precise, and well combined: from place choices, language choices, historical evidences. Maybe I'm most taken by this novel because of its self-location among mythologies, but it definitely works. Delillo has a tendency to wax poetic/philosophical, which can seem heavy-handed in other works (The Players, The Body Artist), but flow perfectly here with the landscape of the novel. This is one novel I read repetedly, and I always find it lyrical and profound. On par with the best of his works -- White Noise & Underworld -- and reminiscent of John Fowles The Magus. Really, a tremendous novel.

9.End Zone by: Don DeLillo 1986
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End Zone / 0-14-008568-8 End Zone, an allegory between football, war, and destruction, wonderfully fleshes out the Delillo obsession with mass death and world devastation. His characters wear shirts with mushroom clouds festooned on the front, they brood over Risk-esque games that focus around an "end times" scenario, they meditate in the desert on the nature of death, the meaninglessness of life, and pain of existence. The football analogy is apt, and carefully exploited, but there is much more at work here and even if you don't like, understand, or follow football, the message is not lost. Like White Noise, the analogy centers around the inner workings of an isolated college campus (White Noise has a campus isolated in an idyllic Eastern American setting, End Zone features a campus isolated in a harsh Southern American ... Read More

10.The Body Artist: A Novel by: Don DeLillo January 08, 2002
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I believe Don Delillo is on par with other writers like Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, and Joyce Carol Oates. This short novel is an easy read but it leaves you with more questions than answers about the plot which thinly. It's about a body artist whose husband, a film-maker, commits suicide. She was his third wife. She retreats to an undisclosed location but far away from New York City where they lived. She meets another man who appears to know more about her. I think that I will have to read it again to get the full story but I admire the author's writing style and his ability to make a breakfast scene into pure poetry. There is not much story but character driven strong characters.

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