Don DeLillo Should Win the Nobel Prize

In Episode Twelve, DDSWTNP interview Curt Gardner, creator and keeper of “Don DeLillo’s America,” a prolific and comprehensive website that for nearly 30 years has been the go-to spot for information about DeLillo, from reviews, appearances, and novel publication histories to news of film adaptations and play performances. We cover Curt’s stories of first discovering DeLillo in 1981, what he learn...

Episodes Ten and Eleven: Running Dog  (1 and 2) unpack DeLillo’s frightening post-Vietnam War vision of a nation marked by pornographic personhood, corrupt politics, and an openness to fascistic fantasy, all centered on the quest for a rumored film of an orgy in Hitler’s crumbling Berlin bunker. Pornographers and their well-armed henchmen, obsessive collectors of erotic art, and military men drive...

Episodes Ten and Eleven: Running Dog  (1 and 2) unpack DeLillo’s frightening post-Vietnam War vision of a nation marked by pornographic personhood, corrupt politics, and an openness to fascistic fantasy, all centered on the quest for a rumored film of an orgy in Hitler’s crumbling Berlin bunker. Pornographers and their well-armed henchmen, obsessive collectors of erotic art, and military men drive...

In Episode Nine: Players , DDSWTNP follow the bored, hollow lives of Pammy and Lyle Wynant as they pursue “the glamour of revolutionary violence” and the hope for pastoral peace, taking them from the World Trade Center and New York Stock Exchange to a Maine island and a Toronto motel room. While at heart DeLillo’s first major analysis of the mind of terrorism,  Players is a surprisingly personal n...

In Episode Eight, DDSWTNP take in the wide range of DeLillo’s corpus through passages chosen and recorded by listeners. Great renditions of DeLillo’s many voices abound, from the sinister to the hilarious to the highly lyrical, and we offer our analysis of the language he brings to power, embodiment, and violence. His most popular novels, White Noise  and Underworld , are well represented, but so...

In Episodes 6 and 7: Ratner’s Star (1) and (2), DDSWTNP go spelunking and digging in the myriad caves, holes, and burrows of DeLillo’s mind-bending, encyclopedic novel of “serious play,” his exploration of outer space, the sedimented history of Earth, and so much in between. Mathematical, scientific, and theological insights and uncertainties mingle on every page as DeLillo follows Bronx native Bi...

In Episodes 6 and 7: Ratner’s Star (1) and (2), DDSWTNP go spelunking and digging in the myriad caves, holes, and burrows of DeLillo’s mind-bending, encyclopedic novel of “serious play,” his exploration of outer space, the sedimented history of Earth, and so much in between. Mathematical, scientific, and theological insights and uncertainties mingle on every page as DeLillo follows Bronx native Bi...

Happy 87th birthday, Don DeLillo. In Episode 5: The Lives of DeLillo (1), the first in a planned series about biography, DDSWTNP offer long-time and first-time readers alike new avenues into his work by discussing the first 30 years of his life, as he grew from the son of Italian immigrants and student of Jesuit scholars to the writer of his first published stories. This episode’s many topics incl...

In Episode 4: Great Jones Street , DDSWTNP listen in on a rock icon in retreat on the Lower East Side, Bucky Wunderlick, who leaves his fame and music career behind as other characters descend into terrorism and fascism in pursuit of a drug said to wipe out language itself. Will Bucky “return with a new language,” fall prey to a violent hippie commune that seems to evoke the Weather Underground, o...

In this special episode timed to the 2023 Nobel Prize announcement, DDSWTNP do a brief history and theorization of the Nobel, talk about DeLillo as a global author, and read in detail his astonishing, Kafka-inspired 1997 speech in support of a Chinese dissident writer, “The Artist Naked in a Cage.” #hungerartists #communalmakebelieve #bitingtheswede   Texts referred to in this episode:   Don DeLil...

In Episode 2: End Zone , DDSWTNP do not so much tackle as infringe upon DeLillo’s 1972 novel of “footbawl,” nuclear wargames, and jargon-addled, surprisingly human characters in wasted desert spaces. Topics include race and sports in American culture, football’s dependence on the “word signal,” Rilke’s Ninth Duino Elegy, and some alternate titles for the novel from DeLillo’s archive. #getfetal #ho...

In Episode 1: Americana, DDSWTNP takes on DeLillo’s ravishing first novel, published in 1971 and the herald of a remarkable career to come. We discuss beguiling and beautifully sarcastic David Bell’s nihilistic road trip west, his insights into advertising and art, and his quest to make a film about his past and his country that risks “being crushed by darkness spreading from the edges of the scre...