Because 50 years after the Kennedy assassination, it’s still the most revealing text we have—not about the shooting itself, but about the intricate and conflicting motives beneath it, and our obsession with documenting the aftermath.
Tag Archives: Don DeLillo
Book of Today: Underworld by Don DeLillo
Because the book opens on October 3, 1951, at the game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants where Bobby Thompson hit “The Shot Heard Round the World.” The Giants won the game and and the National League pennant.
Most of the book is set in the 1970s, 80s and 90s — but what could better define the eerie sadness of that era than nostalgia for those heady days when baseball ruled the Earth and New York had two competitive teams?
Underworld was published on this day in 1997.
- Michael Moats
Filed under Book of Today
Fiction Advocate Review: The Angel Esmerelda by Don DeLillo
“HOW BEST TO DESCRIBE DELILLO AND HIS PLACE IN OUR CULTURAL LANDSCAPE?” This is one of the questions Matthew Thomas attempts to answer in his Fiction Advocate review of the novelist’s first collection of short stories, “The Angel Esmerelda.”
Taking as his starting point a blandly aggressive techno-frisking in a backed-up New York airport security line, Thomas concludes that “The world that Don DeLillo promised us decades ago had finally been delivered.”
He goes on from there:
Nearly everything his work addresses, be it a failed afternoon tryst or the fate of humanity, is observed with equal weight, largely free of dread, and with an indifferent perspective that borders on solipsism. This is the work of a man who simply enjoys our increasingly strange and terrible world just as much as we enjoy seeing it reflected (however portentously) in his novels.
Filed under Hooray Fiction!
