Libra (Penguin Modern Classics)

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willing to take imaginative leaps if there's a kind of redemptive truth waiting at the other end.''

Although they have received some acclaim in places, DeLillo's post- Underworld novels have been often viewed by critics as "disappointing and slight, especially when held up against his earlier, big-canvas epics", [28] marking a shift "away from sweeping, era-defining novels" such as White Noise, Libra and Underworld to a more "spare and oblique" [28] style, characterized by "decreased length, the decommissioning of plot machinery and the steep deceleration of narrative time". [39] Speaking by telephone from his home in the New York City suburbs, Don DeLillo said he spent three years researching and writing ''Libra,'' a fictional biography of Lee Harvey Oswald, as a way of filling in the painful gaps in our knowledge as a boy in the Bronx - a misfit, a chronic truant, sharing oppressively close quarters with his mother. Then there's a brief intermission: a glimpse into the book-filled, document-choked study of Nicholas Branch, who is writing a

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did she want her Alpo. He parked in a lot across the street from the Western Union office. He opened the trunk, got out the dog food and a can opener and fixed the dog her meal, which he left on the front seat. He took two thousand dollars This engagement with the outside world renders DeLillo somewhat unfashionable in an age of autofiction and internal stories with no moving parts. He had done it before, too: his debut novel Americana (1971) touched on the manipulations of what would later be called reality television. And he would do it again: Underworld (1997) takes on more or less everything that happened in – or to – the US in the second half of the 20th Century, and Falling Man (2007) was inspired by the collapse of the Twin Towers. In all these books, DeLillo is interested not just in these aspects of the world, but in what is hidden from us. "The American mystery deepens," he wrote in White Noise. an important role nevertheless. He reminds us of the broader view; he casts the light of history over the other characters' most commonplace moments.

T he Names, probably the least known of this trifecta, is soaked in the triumphant self-mythologizing endemic to a superpower. Its protagonist, James Axton, is an American working as a corporate risk analyst in Athens. Axton’s days are an expatriate’s seesawing from mundane activity to joyless pleasure, his sensibilities always at odds with a jagged, old city that now serves as a forward operating base for Americans working the levers of finance, oil, and military aid in Asia and the Middle East. In November 2015, DeLillo received the 2015 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters at the 66th National Book Awards Ceremony. The ceremony was held on November 8 in New York City, and he was presented his award by Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Egan, a writer profoundly influenced by DeLillo's work. [59] In his acceptance speech, DeLillo reflected upon his career as a reader as well as a writer, recalling examining his personal book collection and feeling a profound sense of personal connection to literature: "Here I'm not the writer at all, I'm a grateful reader. When I look at my bookshelves I find myself gazing like a museum-goer." [60] In February 2016, DeLillo was the guest of honor at an academic conference dedicated to his work, "Don DeLillo: Fiction Rescues History", a three-day event at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. [61] In the novel, Oswald is portrayed as an odd man with dyslexia. DeLillo describes Oswald as a complicated man who readers can easily identify with. For example, in the novel Oswald is loving towards his wife and children but also beats his own wife and disrespects his mother. of eyewitness accounts, hair samples, chemical analyses, then the accounts of the dreams of eyewitnesses and then 25 years of novels and plays and radio debates about the assassination. He's not really part of the story, but he plays

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As a teenager, DeLillo was not interested in writing until he took a summer job as a parking attendant, where the hours spent waiting and watching over vehicles led to a lifelong reading habit. Reflecting on this period, in a 2010 interview, he stated, "I had a personal golden age of reading in my 20s and my early 30s, and then my writing began to take up so much time". [8] Among the writers DeLillo read and was inspired by in this period were James Joyce, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Ernest Hemingway, who was a major influence on DeLillo's earliest attempts at writing in his late teens. [9] field. Certain preoccupations, however, tend to reassert themselves: the assassination of President Kennedy, the labyrinthine underworld of spies and terrorists and (most notably in ''White Noise,'' which won the