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“... arm of American fiction – the tradition of Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, William Gaddis and Don DeLillo. That might not sound hard if you think of R&D as a matter of surface effects: pop-cultural references, metafictional gestures, glazed irony and so on. But for Moody (b.1961), as for Jonathan Franzen (b.1959) and David Foster Wallace ...”

“... much intelligence or subtlety: ‘These are the motives which this society says matter and they don’t make any sense; I mean, imagine a guy murdering someone over a designer label.’ American Psycho is murder fiction as cultural warning, and if it weren’t so crude it could be called classically satirical: if this motive or appetite in your society ...”

“... became more urgent; but you are more likely to ask questions about what you see than what you don’t. The non-circulation in the Western world of documentary footage of dead Iraqi civilians, and now of those Afghan villagers visited by our drone-launched weapons of indiscriminate (how many before we call it ‘mass’?) destruction, is of a part with the ...”

“... funny woman who had appeared in one of his movies. By that time Warhol had come to represent what Don DeLillo has called ‘the revenge of popular culture on those who take it too seriously’. Warhol outlined a new sort of wanting. America is there in his paintings, and the things people wanted – a Coke, a perfection, a quick end – are documented in ...”

“... time is the thing that slips away: No but you see I’ve got to explain all this because I don’t, we don’t know how much time there is left and I have to work on the, to finish this work of mine while I, why I’ve brought in this whole pile of books notes pages clippings and God knows what, get it all sorted and ...”

“... his strongest affinity to a writer in the previous generation is to Donald Barthelme, not Don DeLillo; he’s the least likely to be topical, to dramatise a few years’ close reading of the New York Times, to set down anti-capitalist allegories, or to moralise at all; he gives theory no quarter; his world is the darkest; he’s the last one ...”

“... that the term was ‘painfully accurate’, and mounted a defence of David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo, as if the prescriptive Englishman posed the already canonised Americans a grave threat. ‘We cannot be all the writers all the time,’ she wrote. ‘We can only be who we are … Writers do not write what they want, they write what they ...”

“... the Manhattan skyline on the Brooklyn side of the East River and having a beer and discussing Don DeLillo after a game of touch football. All the Sad Young Literary Men is a Bildungsroman, in which the boys’ reward for their suffering is not marriage but a career and a falling away of their many anxieties. Charm has won out over ridicule, giving ...”

“... in and how attitudes develop among our young people. Over the last weekend I saw a movie – I don’t see too many movies but I try to see them on weekends when I am at the Western White House or in Florida – and the movie I selected, or, as a matter of fact, my daughter Tricia selected it, was Chisum with John Wayne. It was a Western. FDR was known to ...”

“... he tries to speak but is able only to writhe and shriek. The other tells of the regeneration of Don Gately, a man ten years older and, in some ways, Hal’s opposite – the neglected child of an alcoholic single mother, a high-school dropout and painkiller addict, who is known to his so-called friends as BIM (for Big Indestructible Moron) – who yet has ...”

“... bliss in every atom.’ He did not feel that, maybe, but he could make a man who did. ‘I don’t remember what I did with all my real attention, what-all it was going towards,’ Fogle says. It is always underlined in Wallace’s work, it is believed in without qualification or irony: your real attention. What is it, as a substance? An ichor that ...”

“... people are gone) or of finding some absent middle ground; it is a matter of getting what people don’t seem to get, and why they don’t get it. Similarly, in the later essay, looking at A.E. Housman’s apparently odd commitment to the enduring study of ‘a long, dull and difficult first-century ...”

“... an essay published in the American Association of Retired Persons’ bimonthly magazine. ‘I don’t mean to complain. Old age treats freelance writers pretty gently. There is no compulsory retirement at the office, and no athletic injuries signal that the game is over for good.’ And unlike other writers who grew old with and at the New Yorker ...”

“... to have been of interest, he thinks, to modernist and postmodern writers from James Joyce to Don DeLillo, Margaret Atwood and Sarah Waters. Chapters on the delight Dickens took in names and his use of coincidence demonstrate with equal conviction that technique can be a way of knowing the world.Mullan’s accounts of key preoccupations ...”

“... nightmare, in Mailer’s attacks on plastic, in the brilliant fictional exploration by Don DeLillo of how television images get confused with life, and now in Baudrillard’s hopped-up vision of America as the place where one can witness, in the form of apocalyptic orgy, ‘the disappearance of history and the real in the televisual’. The ...”