The Silence By DeLillo Don

About The Book

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.

Editorial Reviews

"DeLillo has a special receiver that we the rest of us don’t have. He can hear and see things in the culture long before everybody else does. Every sentence radiates with his uncanny feeling for this moment and for the moment about to come." —Rachel Kushner, author of The Hard Crowd

"DeLillo . . . creates a powerful rendering of a crowd unified by a terrifying event that defies all available models of comprehension." —The New Yorker

"[Readers] will find something poignant and terrible in this strange unbroken silence."—Michael Gorra, NY Review of Books

“[DeLillo] isolate[s] the raw material of the form, the language, through speech fragments and monologues, in the same way a painter might with color ... It’s an ability of DeLillo’s both philosophic and poetic, to stare at the familiar thing, to see the familiar new…” —Alexander Sammartino, Literary Hub

"DeLillo's prose is always supple, his gaze into our culture's black hole as penetrating as ever. Equal parts lush and spare, The Silence never settles for easy answers." —Hamilton Cain, Minneapolis Star-Tribune

"DeLillo's shrewd, darkly comic observations about the extravagance and alienation of contemporary life can still slice like a scalpel." —Leah Greenblatt, EW

About Author

DeLillo Don

DeLillo Don is the author of fifteen novels, including Zero K, Underworld, Falling Man, White Noise, and Libra. He has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize for his complete body of work, and the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2010, he was awarded the PEN/Saul Bellow Prize. The Angel Esmeralda was a finalist for the 2011 Story Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In 2012, DeLillo received the Carl Sandburg Literary Award for his body of work.