(Scribner, $24)
Don DeLillo’s skepticism sometimes works against him, said Martin Amis in The New Yorker. The novelist’s first short-story collection is a fair mix of “first- and second-echelon work” that’s been published since 1979, and the “arid” second-tier stuff suffers from DeLillo’s allergy to assigning his characters clear motives. But “the gods have equipped DeLillo with the antenna of a visionary” regarding our collective anxieties. His humor is a key asset, said John Banville in the Financial Times, because in certain of these nine stories, not a lot happens. A vacationing couple waits for days for a departing flight; two astronauts gaze down on Earth from a space capsule. Often, DeLillo is playing bemused witness to “the disasters peculiar to our time”—nuclear standoff, global Ponzi schemes. In one recent story, he puts financial fraudsters in prison and has them watching two preteens on cable delivering rapid-fire market news. It’s “a marvelous conceit”—typical of our “most subversive dreamer of contemporary nightmares.”
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
-
Why more and more adults are reaching for soft toysUnder The Radar Does the popularity of the Squishmallow show Gen Z are 'scared to grow up'?
-
Magazine solutions - December 27, 2024 / January 3, 2025Puzzles and Quizzes Issue - December 27, 2024 / January 3, 2025
-
Magazine printables - December 27, 2024 / January 3, 2025Puzzles and Quizzes Issue - December 27, 2024 / January 3, 2025
-
Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
-
Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
-
The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
-
Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
-
Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
-
Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
-
You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
-
Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”