The Silence

Description

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 DeLillo's prescience, imagination and language been more illuminating and essential.

Don DeLillo is the author of numerous 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. His story collection The Angel Esmeralda was a finalist for the 2011 Story Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He has also written several plays.

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