Stephan Eirik Clark, author of a new novel about artificial sweeteners, Sweetness #9, discusses his fascination with Don DeLillo’s White Noise over at The Atlantic:

White Noise, though—it was something more. It was getting at what I’d always wanted to get. It was full of American yearning, a kind of Pilgrim’s Progress for the 20th Century. It held up everything for examination, even the supermarket.

And so after I read Fast Food Nation and began to become intensely curious about the role artificial flavorings and other food additives play in our lives, it was only natural that I would reach for White Noise and re-read its opening before typing the first lines of my debut novel.