White Noise

Zusatztext "One of the most ironic! intelligent! grimly funny voices to comment on life in present-day America . . . [ White Noise ] poses inescapable questions with consummate skill." --Jayne Anne Phillips! The New York Times Book Review "DeLillo's eighth novel should win him wide recognition as one of the best American noveslists. . . . the homey comedy of White Noise invites us into a world we're glad to enter. Then the sinister buzz of implication makes the book unforgettably disturbing." -- Newsweek "A stunning book . . . it is a novel of hairline prophecy! showing a desolate and all-too-believable future in the evidence of an all-too-recognizable present. . . . Through tenderness! wit! and a powerful irony! DeLillo has made every aspect of White Noise a moving picture of a disquiet we seem to share more and more." -- Los Angeles Times  "It's brilliance is dark and sheathed. And probing. In White Noise ! Don DeLillo takes a Geiger-counter reading of the American family! and comes up with ominous clicks." -- Vanity Fair "A stunning performance from one of our most intelligent novelists . . . Tremendously funny." -- The New Republic   Informationen zum Autor Don DeLillo; Introduction by Richard Powers Klappentext Winner of the 1985 National Book Award-from the author of Zero K A Penguin Classic Winner of the National Book Award, White Noise tells the story of Jack Gladney, his fourth wife, Babette, and four ultra­modern offspring as they navigate the rocky passages of family life to the background babble of brand-name consumerism. When an industrial accident unleashes an "airborne toxic event," a lethal black chemical cloud floats over their lives. The menacing cloud is a more urgent and visible version of the "white noise" engulfing the Gladneys-radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, ultrasonic appliances, and TV murmurings-pulsing with life, yet suggesting something ominous. For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators. Leseprobe Waves and Radiation 1 THE STATION WAGONS arrived at noon, a long shining line that coursed through the west campus. In single file they eased around the orange I-beam sculpture and moved toward the dormitories. The roofs of the station wagons were loaded down with carefully secured suitcases full of light and heavy clothing; with boxes of blankets, boots and shoes, stationery and books, sheets, pillows, quilts; with rolled-up rugs and sleeping bags; with bicycles, skis, rucksacks, English and Western saddles, inflated rafts. As cars slowed to a crawl and stopped, students sprang out and raced to the rear doors to begin removing the objects inside; the stereo sets, radios, personal computers; small refrigerators and table ranges; the cartons of phonograph records and cassettes; the hairdryers and styling irons; the tennis rackets, soccer balls, hockey and lacrosse sticks, bows and arrows; the controlled substances, the birth control pills and devices; the junk food still in shopping bags—onion-and-garlic chips, nacho thins, peanut creme patties, Waffelos and Kabooms, fruit chews and toffee popcorn; the Dum-Dum pops, the Mystic mints. I’ve witnessed this spectacle every September for twenty-one years. It is a brilliant event, invariably. The students greet each other with comic cries and gestures of sodden collapse. Their summer has been b...

About the author

Don DeLillo published his first short story when he was twenty-three years old. He has since written more than a dozen novels, including White Noise (1985), which won the National Book Award. It was followed by Libra (1988), his novel about the assassination of President Kennedy, and by Mao II, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In 1997 he published the bestselling Underworld, and in 1999 he was awarded the Jerusalem Prize, given to a writer whose work expresses the theme of the freedom of the individual in society; he was the first American author to receive it. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Richard Powers (introduction) is the author of more than a dozen novels, including the Pulitzer Prize winner The Overstory and the National Book Award winner The Echo Maker. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, he lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.

Product details

• Authors: Don DeLillo, Richard Powers
• Assisted by: Richard Powers (Introduction)
• Publisher: Penguin Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 29.12.2009
• EAN: 9780143105985
• ISBN: 978-0-14-310598-5
• No. of pages: 336
• Dimensions: 145 mm x 215 mm x 20 mm
• Series: Penguin Classics; Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition; Deluxe Classics; Penguin Classics Deluxe Editio; Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition; Deluxe Classics
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature