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“... verities in small individual lives’ rather than ‘taking a broad canvas of society’ like Don DeLillo or Philip Roth. Well, Winters retorts: way back in high school we learned that the major themes of literature were birth, love, understanding, work, loneliness, connection and death. We believed that the readers of novels were themselves ...”

“... the smartest lines in the story, being allowed, for example, to expand on his pet theories about Don Quixote and the difficulties, significantly enough, of representation. ‘Remember: throughout the book Don Quixote is preoccupied by the question of posterity. Again and again he wonders how accurately his chronicler will ...”

“... and war. The masters of this quintessentially American literature have been Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, prophets of Cold War paranoia, rather than Philip Roth and Jonathan Franzen, or all the chroniclers of the immigrant experience from Henry Roth to Jhumpa Lahiri. Pynchon and DeLillo have had oddly few ...”

“... of pain. Another answer would involve exploring paranoia itself as a symptom, which is what Don DeLillo does in his marvellous novel Libra. For DeLillo Kennedy’s death is not so much a mystery as a catalyst: it provokes a show of the intricate weirdness of American (and no doubt other) life, of the infestation ...”

“... on here. My guess is that Rush-die is partly labouring under the strong and difficult influence of Don DeLillo. He exhibits a DeLillo-ish concern with the limousine-borne power-brokers who shape our world, and the secret networks that underlie it. Like many of DeLillo’s ...”

“... on a doomed attempt to fix the chaos with a meaning. This is true again in Leviathan, dedicated to Don DeLillo, where again Walden and Thoreau feature, this time as inspiration for a novelist called Benjamin Sachs, whose dissatisfaction with writing fiction as a way of engaging with the world leads him, via Austerian chains of coincidence, to a campaign ...”

“... to account for the picture’s appeal, and here and there tosses in contemporary references – Don DeLillo, Marilyn Monroe – to gesture toward some quintessential Americanness in Whistler. It’s when Walden turns to the paintings themselves that her book comes alive. The restorer turns sleuth, ferreting out secrets: thus the misty indeterminateness ...”

“... John Kennedy Toole, whose A Confederacy of Dunces is a book nearly as bloated as its protagonist; Don DeLillo’s social, um, satires owe more than a little to Pynchon’s work; and in a recent essay in Harper’s magazine the young novelist Jonathan Franzen declares Pynchon a personal hero. David Foster Wallace moves beyond admiration to adulation ...”

“... attacks of 9/11 provoked some disquieting epiphanies: ‘Our world, parts of our world’, Don DeLillo warned, had ‘crumbled into theirs’, condemning us to live ‘in a place of danger and rage’. Nevertheless the dominant assumption until the 2008 financial crisis was that ‘the dramatic climb of the Dow and the speed of the internet ...”

“... with the undead. I had come along in the course of my duties as a hopeless necromantic. I don’t think I have ever believed that pop stars and movie stars actually die – death becomes them, and true legends have a tendency to ghost the future – but even so I was nervous that the certifiably snuffed-it Whitney might not be up to snuff. What if her ...”

“... watched over six hours a day in the average American household,’ he wrote in a 1992 essay. ‘I don’t know any fiction writers who live in average American households … Actually I have never seen an average American household. Except on TV.’ He conceptualised the problem in Infinite Jest, the title of which refers to a videotape that’s so hard to ...”

“... musicians and movie stars, we continue to consume the work that made them famous. But people don’t usually watch old ball games.) It was connected to a generational shift in the way basketball is played. For the past six or seven seasons the NBA had been reshaping itself according to ideas about playing ‘efficiency’ driven by increased access to ...”

“... Robert Stone was born in August 1937, nine months after Don DeLillo and three – we’re told – after Thomas Pynchon. Dog Soldiers, his second novel, made his name in the mid-1970s, and since then he has stubbornly held his ground on the upper slopes of American literary life. Fellowships, prizes, grants and commissions have rarely been in short supply, and his later books – from A Flag for Sunrise to Damascus Gate – have been much admired ...”

“... by all readers and writers of stories. More fully perhaps than any other novelist, including Don DeLillo, with whom he is so often (and so oddly) paired, Pynchon has explored and exposed the overlap between paranoia and fiction, between the plots imagined or unearthed by conspiracy theorists and the plots of novels, not least because both are ...”