Search Results

“... 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 ...”

“... you,’ Nixon said at the eighth stop. ‘You never miss a chance to make propaganda.’ ‘I don’t make propaganda,’ Khrushchev said. ‘I tell the truth.’ The matter of truth hangs over Carlson’s book. Whose world was more real? Whose version of history would triumph? The book mimics the moral play-acting of the period, embedding opposing views ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for more complex and ambitious non-fiction novels by Norman Mailer (The Executioner’s Song) and Don DeLillo (Libra). In the massive, magisterial The Best American Short Stories of the Century edited by John Updike, Flannery O’Connor is included with one of her much anthologised stories, ‘Greenleaf’, while McCullers and Capote are not only ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”