White Noise
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Engdahl’s Game
Another year, another Nobel Prize in Literature not given to Don DeLillo. At The New Republic, Alex Shephard argues that DeLillo should have been a contender: …of all the leading American Nobel candidates, DeLillo is a writer of the moment. In an…
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Some Kind of Deft Acceleration
Over at the New Yorker, Thomas Beller writes about reading Don DeLillo’s White Noise, with its opening move-in day scene on repeat, and the ways stories change when read again and again—even and especially presidential races and speeches, as with Bill Clinton’s speech…
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Where Books Meet Their Ends
For the Guardian, Sam Jordison draws parallels between Don DeLillo’s previous novels (White Noise and Omega) and his most recent novel, Zero K: In Point Omega, we’re told: “The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever.” In White…
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The Cool Future
“All plots tend to move deathward,” the narrator of “White Noise” says. “This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers’ plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children’s games. We edge nearer death every time we…
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Total Noise and Complete Saturation
For as long as I can remember I’ve been interested, in a clinical way, in silence.
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Learning by Listening
The Millions staff writer Nick Ripatrazone examines literature that “embraces the power of radio” and highlights the sounds of language: Radio is elegiac. Radio is the theater of the mind: our eyes are free to look elsewhere, but the sound bounces in…
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Taylor Swift’s White Noise
Nothing much more needs to be said: At the Atlantic, “the author of White Noise reviews Taylor Swift’s white noise.”
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Examining the Ordinary
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…
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The Last Book I Loved: White Noise
In the mid-1980s, I fled Ronald Reagan’s America for the jungles of Costa Rica. Before leaving–forever, I thought–I shipped two boxes of paperbacks to the tropics. I would soon read every book from those boxes plus anything else I could…
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The Urgent Matter of Books
People keep telling me that books are in danger of disappearing. E-books, Kindles, iPads will replace the object of the book as we know it. I’m not worried.
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Bright Lights, Big City and “The Shattering of the Self”
“…Jay McInerney’s 1984 publication of Bright Lights allows us excavation to an even earlier level of American self-confusion. The novel’s second-person narrative, which people found so powerfully affecting, cannot be dismissed as but a clever trick when seen in a…
