Don DeLillo Should Win the Nobel Prize

In Episode 37, DDSWTNP kick off the Summer of Underworld with an overview that, like Episode 20: Discovering White Noise , offers newcomers to the novel a set of things to look out for as well as readings bound to appeal to those already familiar with DeLillo’s big book and headed back to it. How is this mega-novel structured in its six main Parts bookended by Prologue and Epilogue? How and why do...

Transmission incoming from the insane world of Ratner’s Star , DeLillo’s fourth novel, a major change in his fiction and his most difficult text, underappreciated as precedent for his later turns on encyclopedic form in Libra and Underworld . Ratner’s also has, though, tons of connections to earlier works like Americana and End Zone . In this episode DDSWTNP celebrate Ratner’s fiftieth anniversary...

Anticipating a summer to be spent exploring Underworld , DDSWTNP in Episode 35 take a small detour to a DeLillo short story, “Creation,” which distills DeLillo’s omnipresent motifs of Romanticism and Christian mythos, transports literal and figurative, and disillusionment with the maintenance of Edenic experience — perhaps especially for the American tourist trying to escape from, rather than into...

In Episode 34 DDSWTNP sit down for a revelatory talk with Tom LeClair, a founding critic in the study of DeLillo, his longtime friend and liaison to the literary world, and a figure who has both written fiction shaped by DeLillo’s and (he suggests) seen his own stories turned into scenes and dialogue by DeLillo himself. We get into LeClair’s relationship with DeLillo going back more than forty yea...

“Here they come, marching into American sunlight.” In Episode 33, DDSWTNP follow Mao II from this opening line into a chilling view of a mass Moonie wedding at Yankee Stadium, and on into the story of reclusive novelist Bill Gray, whose work, maybe, has a chance of deprogramming the mind and language of Karen Janney, one of the participants in that wedding – but maybe not, given the totalizing dom...

We do have our favorite but surely wouldn’t mind if Thomas Pynchon won the Nobel Prize too . . . and in Episode 32 we finish off 2025 by considering Shadow Ticket , the noir detective take on the 1930s by a writer who was surely a key influence on the early DeLillo (we read from an unpublished DeLillo letter summarizing that relationship) but who also seems to have been reading works like Running...

In Episode 31 DDSWTNP get the chance to talk about DeLillo with his friend, colleague, and editor Gerald Howard, whose distinguished career in publishing at Viking Penguin, Norton, and Doubleday spanned nearly 50 years and was marked by his work not only on  Libra  but important books by David Foster Wallace, Paul Auster, and so many others. We hear Gerry recount first reading the DeLillo of  Amer...

In Episode 30, DDSWTNP once again use the occasion of the Nobel Prize (which on October 9, 2025, was awarded to Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai) to talk about a prize Don DeLillo did win: the 2013 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. We dig into the award presentation and an interview he gave then about his whole career, from how he begins his novels and finds their structures, to...

In Episode 29, DDSWTNP go to space to get a good look at the earth in a time of war, turning to one of DeLillo’s greatest short stories, “Human Moments in World War III,” first published in July 1983. We examine this tale of two future astronauts who have become soldiers for its strategic engagement with the tropes of science fiction, its eerie portrayals of the so-called “Overview Effect” availab...

We’re still not done with Libra  – or Libra  is not done with us! In Episode 28, DDSWTNP pick up threads left hanging after our three-part treatment of DeLillo’s JFK novel. While tackling a wide variety of subjects, this episode homes in on Anthony DeCurtis’s 1988 interview with DeLillo for Rolling Stone (and later re-published in expanded form), “An Outsider in This Society.” We’re led to discuss...

So who killed JFK? We still don’t know, but we’re concluding our series on DeLillo’s conspiratorial history with Episode 27:  Libra  (3). This episode begins by focusing on the unexpected injection of humor and depth that comes with Jack Ruby, another reluctant shooter, in the novel’s second part. We draw into this episode some comparisons of  Libra  to other artists’ paranoid visions of conspirac...

In Episode 26: Libra (2), DDSWTNP continue our deep dive into DeLillo’s story of Oswald and CIA plotters, taking on the distinctions between lone-gunman and systems theories, the unique role of Bobby Dupard in Oswald’s arc, and all this novel has to teach us about “diminishing existence” and the taste for mediated violence as it’s grown since the watershed moment of 1963. Major segments here focus...

Who killed JFK? What forces made the mind and actions of Lee Oswald? And what does it mean to be an agent of history or something called fate? DDSWTNP probe these and other big questions in multiple new episodes on Libra  released over the coming month. June may be the time of Gemini, another sign of doubles in the Zodiac, but for us it’s a month for the balance scale, tipping one way or the other...

What does the déjà vu allegedly caused by the Airborne Toxic Event have to do with a disease called Jumping Frenchman? How is Jack Gladney’s “day of the station wagons” connected to the first female NHL player’s longing for quaint hometown holidays? In Episode 24, DDSWTNP continue our White Noise residency by showing listeners all the hidden connections between DeLillo’s most famous novel and his...

Roll film! In Episode 23, DDSWTNP continue our White Noise  residency by heading to the movies (or the TV screen) and examining Noah Baumbach’s 2022 film adaptation of the novel. We discuss the drive over the years to adapt the supposedly “unadaptable” DeLillo for the screen, the 2020s context of this film, and our varied reactions to successive viewings of it over the two-plus years since its rel...

We’ve arrived at the big one, the breakthrough book of 1985 – White Noise . In Episodes 21 and 22, DDSWTNP extend our White Noise  “residency” and turn in-depth attention to DeLillo’s most popular piece of fiction in another double episode.    Episode 21: White Noise (1) takes an expansive view of the novel’s narrative and goes into depth on (among many other subjects) the iconic opening chapter’s...

We’ve arrived at the big one, the breakthrough book of 1985 – White Noise . In Episodes 21 and 22, DDSWTNP extend our White Noise  “residency” and turn in-depth attention to DeLillo’s most popular piece of fiction in another double episode.    Episode 21: White Noise (1) takes an expansive view of the novel’s narrative and goes into depth on (among many other subjects) the iconic opening chapter’s...

Looking to start reading Don DeLillo, or already a fan and looking for ways to persuade your friends, relatives, or students to finally access the wonders of White Noise ? In Episode Twenty, DDSWTNP offer an introduction to White Noise  for the first-time reader of DeLillo, focusing on elements of plot, action, character, humor, and voice that often present stumbling blocks to initiates. We help l...

In Episode Nineteen, DDSWTNP turn outward to a discussion of Rachel Kushner, whose Booker Prize-nominated Creation Lake , a 2024 novel about the folly of espionage, revolutionary violence, life underground, and confronting modernity with ancient practices in rural France, solidifies its author’s reputation as a key inheritor of DeLillo’s influence and themes. Creation Lake  is narrated by a nihili...

In Episode Eighteen, DDSWTNP wish our author a happy 88th birthday and talk about the international life he led between the mid-1970s and early 1980s. We follow DeLillo abroad, covering his year in Canada (1975) and his much-discussed time living in Athens (1978-1982), tracing influences of these experiences on portrayals of national identity and language in The Names  especially but other works t...

In Episode Seventeen, DDSWTNP briefly discuss new Nobel Laureate Han Kang before digging into “A History of the Writer Alone in a Room,” DeLillo’s acceptance speech for an award he did win, the 1999 Jerusalem Prize. In this unpublished, hard-to-find text, DeLillo tells the humbling story of the novelist at frustratingly slow work, “shaped by the vast social reality that rumbles all around him,” in...

In Episode Sixteen: “DeLillo’s Sentences,” DDSWTNP take a brief break from analyzing full novels to do some very close reading of single sentences from across DeLillo’s career. Style and craft, sound and rhythm, and what makes DeLillo (as one critic puts it) a poet writing prose—these are subjects we consider as we look closely at the lines noted below and try to figure out what DeLillo means when...

In Episode Fifteen, DDSWTNP take on The Names , a Greece-based story of a strange “abecedarian” murder cult, a novel regarded by DeLillo as his turn toward more “serious” writing and placed at or near the top of many a reader’s list of favorites. We discuss The Names  as an examination of the “Depravities” and guilt of being an American in the complex late-1970s world of corporations, risk analysi...

In Episode Fourteen, DDSWTNP turn our attention for the first time to DeLillo’s drama – and to a largely unknown work by DeLillo as playwright, a 1966 radio play and disturbing take on U.S. race relations titled Mother . We cover the circumstances of the play’s original broadcasts, its re-emergence in an internet archive recording more than 50 years later, and the strange way in which this story’s...

In Episode Thirteen, DDSWTNP follow the puck into the corners with Cleo Birdwell, first female NHL player and ostensible author of the farcical, sex-fueled, “intimate” memoir Amazons , the 1980 satire of a “pseudo-profound” America that DeLillo co-wrote with Sue Buck. Amazons  is a sports novel with perhaps more interest in “strip Monopoly” than hockey, more investment by Cleo in her Badger Beagle...