(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.”
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