The Silence

About the book

From one of America's greatest writers, The Silence is a timely and compelling novel about what happens when an unpredictable crisis strikes. It is Super Bowl Sunday in the year 2022. Five people are due to have dinner in an apartment on the east side of Manhattan. The hosts are a retired physics professor and her husband; they are joined by one of her former students and await the arrival of another couple, delayed by what becomes a dramatic flight from Paris. In the apartment, talk ranges widely. The opening kickoff is one commercial away. 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 Don DeLillo's prescience, imagination and language been more illuminating and essential.

Reviews

An apocalyptic novel for our times Guardian, Book of the Week

Quotes

An apocalyptic novel for our times * Guardian, Book of the Week * The Silence is a horrifyingly resonant book * Observer * Slim and timely * New Statesman * [DeLillo] is our laureate of paranoia and dread . . . [The Silence] is a pristine disaster novel . . . his best writing here reminds us that, as he puts it . . . "Life can get so interesting that we forget to be afraid" -- Dwight Garner * New York Times * DeLillo's mastery of the fragmented nature of spoken language is displayed in these paranoiac blurts, which every years seem less paranoiac . . . [a] brilliant, brief tale -- J Michael Lennon * TLS * DeLillo is a master stylist, and not a word goes to waste -- Anne Enright * Guardian * Few people write as gorgeously as DeLillo can * Daily Telegraph * The Silence is DeLillo distilled . . . a straight shot of the good stuff * Spectator * A swift and searing haunting of a novel. An encapsulation of our continuing crisis of aberration and pause. The Silence is prime DeLillo. -- Joy Williams 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

Don DeLillo Biography

Donald Richard DeLillo (born November 20, 1936) is an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, screenwriter and essayist. His works have covered subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, sports, the complexities of language, performance art, the Cold War, mathematics, the advent of the digital age, politics, economics, and global terrorism. DeLillo was already a well-regarded cult writer in 1985, when the publication of White Noise brought him widespread recognition and won him the National Book Award for fiction. White Noise was followed in 1988 by Libra, a bestseller. DeLillo has twice been a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist (for Mao II in 1992 and for Underworld in 1998), won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Mao II in 1992 (receiving another PEN/Faulkner Award nomination for The Angel Esmeralda in 2012), won the 1999 Jerusalem Prize, was granted the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2010, and won the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction in 2013.DeLillo had described his fiction as concerned with "living in dangerous times", and in a 2005 interview he said that writers "must oppose systems. It's important to write against power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments... I think writers, by nature, must oppose things, oppose whatever power tries to impose on us."

Early life and influences

DeLillo was born on November 20, 1936, in New York City and grew up in a working-class Italian Catholic family with ties to Molise, Italy, in an Italian-American neighborhood of the Bronx not far from Arthur Avenue. Reflecting on his childhood in The Bronx, DeLillo said he was "always out in the street. As a little boy I whiled away most of my time pretending to be a baseball announcer on the radio. I could think up games for hours at a time. There were eleven of us in a small house, but the close quarters were never a problem. I didn't know things any other way. We always spoke English and Italian all mixed up together. My grandmother, who lived in America for fifty years, never learned English."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". 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.As well as the influence of modernist fiction, DeLillo has also cited the influence of jazz music—"guys like Ornette Coleman and Mingus and Coltrane and Miles Davis"—and postwar cinema: "Antonioni and Godard and Truffaut, and then in the '70s came the Americans, ... Read full biography