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A definitive edition of a modern master: three essential works that reveal his incomparable style, dark humor, and uncanny sensitivity to the complexities of "living in dangerous times" Includes White Noise, now a major motion picture starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig This first volume in the Library of America Don DeLillo edition presents three indispensable novels from the 1980s, published here with new prefaces from the author. The Names (1982) was DeLillo's breakthrough novel, a book that, as he reflects here, spanned a "broader expanse" than his earlier novels. James Axton, a "risk analyst" tasked with assessing dangers for his corporate clients from terrorism and other forms of political upheaval, uncovers evidence of ritual murders committed by a cult obsessed with ancient languages. The investigations of these crimes yields a profound series of meditations on identity, disconnection, and the nature of language itself. Part campus satire, part midlife character study, and part fever dream of a hyperreality that has become uncannily familiar, the National Book Award-winning White Noise (1985) creates a terrifying yet wickedly funny portrait of a postmodern America that is still recognizably ours, a world where children chant brand names in their sleep, university professors "read nothing but cereal boxes," and "you are the sum of your data." Three years in the research and writing, Libra (1988) offers a magnificent counter-history of the JFK assassination and a nuanced portrait of the president's murderer. DeLillo has observed that "the novel, working within history, is also outside it, correcting, clearing up, finding balances and rhythms." The result is a revelatory new depiction of a defining event in twentieth-century history. Rounding out the volume are two hard-to-find essays directly related to the novels: "American Blood," the 1983 Rolling Stone article that was DeLillo's first effort to grapple with the JFK assassination and the welter of information and speculation the events of the killing and Oswald's own murder by Jack Ruby; and "Silhouette City," an assessment of extremist right-wing groups and the troubling presence of neo-Nazism in the United States.

The definitive edition of a modern master continues with 2 mid-career masterpieces, published here with new prefaces from the author This second volume in the Library of America DeLillo edition collects two extraordinary novels he published in the 1990s, the peak of his career. In the PEN/Faulkner Award-winning Mao II (1991), the celebrated novelist Bill Gray has withdrawn into seclusion, his everyday affairs managed by a pair of assistants. And yet within the protective solitude he has built for himself he still finds himself struggling--with pills and with a novel he can't manage to complete. A visit from a Swedish photographer who specializes in author portraits spurs him to shake off his world-weariness, and soon the reclusive writer is embarked on an unlikely journey to help broker the release of a poet held hostage by terrorists in Beirut. Mao II, writes the critic Sven Birkerts, is "DeLillo's strongest statement yet about the crisis of crises. Namely, that we are living in the last violet twilight of the individual, and that 'the future belongs to crowds.'" Underworld (1997), DeLillo's magnum opus and a book that ranks among the greatest of twentieth-century novels, is a sprawling, ambitious, and moving panorama of the postwar American experience. It begins with a tour de force re-imagination of one of the great moments in sports: the decisive pennant game between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers at the Polo Grounds in 1951, culminating in the now legendary "shot heard 'round the world" home run by Bobby Thomson. In DeLillo's hands the excitement of the game is juxtaposed with something far more momentous, the announcement of the Soviets' first atomic test--a coincidence that initiates a kaleidoscopic saga that is woven across more than four decades, shuttling back and forth through time and mixing fictional characters with historical figures such as Lenny Bruce and J. Edgar Hoover. The novel is at once a profound meditation on our contemporary condition and a deeply personal book for its author, drawing poignantly on his memories of growing up in the Bronx. "All of DeLillo is in Underworld," writes Harold Bloom. "DeLillo's sense of America, in the second half of the twentieth century, is achieved perfectly." Here is the ultimate gift for DeLillo fans and perfect introduction for readers interested in discovering or rediscovering a great American writer.

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 RepublicThe 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.

"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.

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.

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.

The National Book Award-winning classic from the author of Underworld and Libra, soon to be a major motion picture starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig White Noise is the story of Jack, his wife, Babette, and their four ultramodern offspring. They live in a college town where Jack is Professor of Hitler Studies (and conceals the fact that he does not speak a word of German), and Babette teaches posture and volunteers by reading tabloids to a group of elderly shut-ins. They are happy enough, until a deadly toxic accident and Babette's addiction to an experimental drug make Jake question everything. White Noise is considered a postmodern classic and its unfolding of themes of consumerism, family and divorce, and technology as a deadly threat have attracted the attention of literary scholars since its publication. This Viking Critical Library edition, prepared by scholar Mark Osteen, is the only edition of White Noise that contains the entire text along with an extensive critical apparatus, including a critical introduction, selected essays on the author, the work, and its themes, reviews, a chronology of DeLillo's life and work, a list of discussion topics, and a selected bibliography.

The National Book Award-winning classic by the author of Underworld and Libra, featuring an introduction by Richard Powers, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory and Playground Now a major motion picture starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig White Noise tells the story of Jack Gladney, his fourth wife, Babette, and four ultra­modern offspring as they navigate the rocky passages of family life to the background babble of brand-name consumerism. When an industrial accident unleashes an "airborne toxic event," a lethal black chemical cloud floats over their lives. The menacing cloud is a more urgent and visible version of the "white noise" engulfing the Gladneys--radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, ultrasonic appliances, and TV murmurings--pulsing with life, yet suggesting something ominous. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

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 RepublicThe 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. Penguin Classics is the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world, representing a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

"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

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.

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

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, and receives a number of important visitors in the fields of security, technology, currency, finance, and theory. Reprint. 75,000 first printing.

A brief, unnerving, and exceptionally hard-hitting novel about time and loss as only the bestselling and National Book Award-winning author of White Noise and Underworld can tell it. In this potent and beautiful novel, the writer The New York Times calls "prophetic about twenty-first-century America" looks into the mind and heart of a scholar who was recruited to help the military conceptualize the war. We see Richard Elster at the end of his service. He has retreated to the desert, in search of space and geologic time. There he is joined by a filmmaker and by Elster's daughter Jessica--an "otherworldly" woman from New York. The three of them build an odd, tender intimacy, something like a family. Then a devastating event turns detachment into colossal grief, and it is a human mystery that haunts the landscape of desert and mind.

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.

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.

The second novel by Don DeLillo, author of White Noise (winner of the National Book Award) and The Silence.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; he is fueled and shielded by his fear of and fascination with nuclear conflict. Among oddly afflicted and recognizable players, the terminologies of football and nuclear war--the language of end zones--become interchangeable, and their meaning deteriorates as the collegiate year runs its course. In this triumphantly funny, deeply searching novel, Don DeLillo explores the metaphor of football as war with rich, original zeal.

From one of the most dazzling and essential voices in American fiction, a timely and compelling novel set in the near future about five people gathered together in a Manhattan apartment, in the midst of a catastrophic event. Don DeLillo completed this novel just weeks before the advent of Covid-19. The Silence is the story of a different catastrophic event. Its resonances offer a mysterious solace. It is Super Bowl Sunday in the year 2022. Five people, dinner, an apartment on the east side of Manhattan. The retired physics professor and her husband and her former student waiting for the couple who will join them from what becomes a dramatic flight from Paris. The conversation ranges from a survey telescope in North-central Chile to a favorite brand of bourbon to Einstein's 1912 Manuscript on the Special Theory of Relativity. Then something happens and the digital connections that have transformed our lives are severed. What follows is a dazzling and profoundly moving conversation about what makes us human. Never has the art of fiction been such an immediate guide to our navigation of a bewildering world. Never have DeLillo's prescience, imagination, and language been more illuminating and essential. "Mysterious...Unexpectedly touching... DeLillo offers] consolation simply by enacting so well the mystery and awe of the real world." --Joshua Ferris, The New York Times Book Review "DeLillo has] almost Dayglo powers as a writer." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "Brilliant and astonishing...a masterpiece...manages to renew DeLillo's longstanding obsessions while also striking deeply and swiftly at the reader's emotions...The effect is transcendent." --Charles Finch, Chicago Tribune "Daring... provocative... exquisite...captures the swelling fears of our age." --Ron Charles, The Washington Post

From the National Book Award-winning author of Underworld, a "daring...provocative...exquisite" (The Washington Post) novel about five people gathered together in a Manhattan apartment, in the midst of a catastrophic event.It is Super Bowl Sunday in the year 2022. Five people, dinner, an apartment on the east side of Manhattan. The retired physics professor and her husband and her former student waiting for the couple who will join them from what becomes a dramatic flight from Paris. The conversation ranges from a survey telescope in North-central Chile to a favorite brand of bourbon to Einstein's 1912 Manuscript on the Special Theory of Relativity. Then something happens and the digital connections that have transformed our lives are severed. What follows is a "brilliant and astonishing...masterpiece" (Chicago Tribune) about what makes us human. Don DeLillo completed this novel just weeks before the advent of the Covid pandemic. His language, the dazzle of his sentences offer a kind of solace in our bewildering world. "DeLillo's shrewd, darkly comic observations about the extravagance and alienation of contemporary life can still slice like a scalpel" (Entertainment Weekly). "In this wry and cutting meditation on collective loss, a rupture severs us, suddenly, from everything we've come to rely on. The Silence seems to absorb DeLillo's entire body of work and sand it into stone or crystal." --Rachel Kushner