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This volume explores the confluences between two types of literature in contemporary America: the novel and the epic. It analyses the tradition of the epic as it has evolved from antiquity, through Joyce to its American manifestations and describes how this tradition has impacted upon contemporary American writing. ... Read more

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In celebration of its 20th anniversary, "Conjunctions", "arguably the most distinguished journal of prose and poetry in America" (Elle), gathers a virtual Who's Who of innovative contemporary literature. "Conjunctions:37" will feature new work by writers as diverse as Don DeLillo, Paul Auster, Chinua Achebe, Rick Moody, Richard Powers, Jorie Graham, William T. Vollmann, Paul West, Carole Maso, Ann Lauterbach, and many surprise contributors. This special issue will also feature an important short story by Vladimir Nabokov, newly translated by Dimitri Nabokov for "Conjunctions", which has never before appeared in English. Joyce Carol Oates offers a first look at her haunting new novel in progress, "The Falls", and William H. Gass gives us a darkly hilarious tour de force with his novella, "Charity". The 20th-anniversary issue will surely be, as the "Village Voice" has said of "Conjunctions", "A must read" for anyone interested in contemporary fiction, poetry, and drama.

"Conjunctions" is striking...a rich collection which balances well-known writers with exciting new ones. --The New York Times Book Review "Conjunctions" offers a showplace for some of the most exciting and demanding writers now at work. --The Washington Post"

Edited by Bradford Morrow.Texts by Paul Auster, Chinua Achebe, Don DeLillo, Nomi Eve, William H. Gass, Jorie Graham, Ann Lauterbach, Harry Matthews, Carole Maso, Rick Moody, Bradford Morrow, Vladimir Nabakov, Joyce Carol Oates,William T. Vollmann and Paul West.

6 x 9 in. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A wonderful collection in its own right
Conjunctions has for a long time been a source of truly new and groundbreaking writing in American Literature.The current issue not only continues this trend, but even exceeds the high water mark set by earliereditions of the journal, taking the time, as it does, to focus only onprose (saving the poetry, I understand, for the next issue).Collected inone place we have stories by some of our finest writers, set alongsideworks by newer, promising authors.From Coover's phantasmagoric andplayful "Alice in the Time of the Jabberwock" to Paul West'shaunting tale, this collection is thought-provoking and expansive. ... Read more

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The book analyzes Ishmael Reed [Mumbo Jumbo], Kathy Acker [The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec by Henri Toulouse Lautrec], and Don Delillo [White Noise], three authors whom critics cite as quintessentially postmodern. For these critics such works possess formal narrative and/or content qualities at odds with modernism. In particular, according to influential thinkers like Fredric Jameson, postmodern works possess narrative form and/or content which eschews reality, and embody a fundamental paradigm shift from the politically committed ideology of modernity and modernism to the politically relativistic ideology of postmodernity and postmodernism.
The book contends that while the above authors do possess numerous so-called "postmodern" qualities, their critical forms and/or contents remain ethically and politically grounded. As most postmodern theory rejects such grounding, its discovery in these prototypical postmodern novels suggests problems with the "postmodern" category itself. ... Read more

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This book presents an ecocritical reading of DeLillo’s novels in an attempt to mediate between the seemingly incompatible influences of postmodernism and environmentalism. Martucci argues that although DeLillo is responding to and engaging with a postmodern culture of simulacra and simulation, his novels do not reflect a postmodernist theory of the end of nature. Rather, his fiction emphasizes the lasting significance of the natural world and alerts us to the dangers of destroying it. In order to support this argument, Martucci examines DeLillo’s novels in the context of traditional American literary representations of the environment, especially through the lens of Leo Marx’s discussion of the conflict between technology and nature found in traditional American literature. She demonstrate that DeLillo’s fiction explores the way in which new technologies alter perceptions and mediate reality to a further extent than earlier technologies; however, she argues that he keeps the material world at the forefront of his novels, thereby illuminating the environmental implications of these technologies. Through close readings of Americana, The Names, White Noise, and Underworld, and discussions of postmodernist and ecocritical theories, this project engages with current criticism of DeLillo, postmodernist fiction, and environmental criticism.

Customer Reviews (1)

The time, the age, the epoch, the season,the culrue, and the genius at full bloom at the outset
No needto write the great American Novel.
It has already been written.
This is it. Vonnegut
in his fiction wrote that all you
need to know how to live is in the Brother's
Karamazov, but it's not enough anymore. If you live
in America, this is the supplement. In the negative sense.
One almost should enjoy this novel one sentence at a time.
Each one is genius. I also like the way Delillo micromanages words,
and sentences. The page is extremely claustrophobic, but it is an extremely cozy nook. The vividness with which this novel comes alive is perhaps its triumph. Delillo has described the journey of David Bell so well, that one can live in it vicariously, and doesn't have to make it themselves. I do not want to make that cross country sojourn anymore to writhe the experience out of Americana, get some vital juice out of being an American. He describes the currents and undercurrents very well.

The heart of the book is, I believe, on page 130.

...Something else was left over for the rest of us, or some of the rest of us, and it was the dream of the good life, innocent enough, simple enough on the surface, beginning for me as soon as I could read and continuing through the era of the early astronauts, the red carpet welcome on the aircraft carrier as the band played on. It encompassed all those things that people are said to want, materials and objects and the shadows they cast, and yet the dream had its complexities, its edges of illusion and self-deception, an implication of serio-comic death. To achieve an existence totally symbolic is less simple than mining the buried metals of other countries or sending the pilots of your squadron to hang their bombs over some illiterate village." [...]

I think this is what Americans are striving to ultimately do, (speaking of the general culture) and this is of course, as Delillo points out in the novel is not only destructive but impossible.

He also talks truth about the role of statistics in the national consciousness. Everyone, will, or should find a foible of Americana that they can appropriate as knowledge, something to call their own form now `till death.

One can get distracted, but the entire message for me is this: There is nothing in the American culture worth having. On the fringes, or in the mainstream. Pick your poison. A book dedicated to this is monumental. This really is, I think, the great American Novel, which is as fertile today as it was in 1971.


... Read more

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Don DeLillo—winner of the National Book Award, the William Dean Howells Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize—is one of the most important novelists of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. While his work can be understood and taught as prescient and postmodern examples of millennial culture, this book argues that DeLillo’s recent novels—White Noise, Libra, Mao II, Underworld, and The Body Artist—are more concerned with spiritual crisis. Although DeLillo’s worlds are rife with rejection of belief and littered with faithfulness, estrangement, and desperation, his novels provide a balancing moral corrective against the conditions they describe. Speaking the vernacular of contemporary America, DeLillo explores the mysteries of what it means to be human. ... Read more

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Since the publication of his first novel, Americana, in 1971, Don DeLillo has been regarded as a preeminent figure of American letters. Among the more prominent themes the author considers throughout his oeuvre is that of consumerism, a topic that is equally essential to the works of French social theorist Jean Baudrillard. Although many critics have glossed the affinities between DeLillo and Baudrillard, this is the first book-length study to explore the relationship between the American author and the French theorist. Bringing DeLillo and Baudrillard into dialogue with each other, this timely volume proffers a sophisticated theoretical framework for understanding the works of both figures, investigates the relationship between works of art and acts of terror, and examines the potential for the individual to survive in the face of the dehumanizing, market-driven forces that dominate the postmodern world.This book will be a valuable addition to collections in American literature, sociology, critical theory, politics, and philosophy."This thorough and thoughtful reading of both writers not only acknowledges their affinities but also exhaustively explores the ways in which their writings inform and illuminate each other." - Dr. Ruth Helyer, University of Teesside (UK) ... Read more

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More than any other major American author, Don DeLillo has examined the manner in which contemporary American consciousness has been shaped by the historically unique incursion into daily life of information, military, and consumer technologies. In DeLillos fictions, technological apparatuses are not merely set-pieces in the characters environments, nor merely tools to move the plot along, they are sites of mystery and magic, whirlpools of space-time, and convex mirrors of identity. Television sets, filmic images, automobiles, airplanes, telephones, computers, and nuclear bombs are not simply objects in the world for DeLillos characters; they are psychological phenomena that shape the possibilities for action, influence the nature of perception, and incorporate themselves into the fabric of memory and identity. DeLillo is a phenomenologist of the contemporary technoscape and an ecologist of our new kind of natural habitat. Through a close reading of four DeLillo novels, Technology and Postmodern Subjectivity in Don DeLillos Novels examines the variety of modes in which DeLillos fictions illustrate the technologically mediated confluence of his human subjects and the field of cultural objects in which they discover themselves. The model of interactionism between human beings and technological instruments that is implicit in DeLillos writing suggests significant applications both to the study of other contemporary novelists as well as to contemporary cultural studies. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Insightful and entertaining
I'm doing my dissertation on technology in American literature and I have to say that this was one of the most helpful and interesting books I've read so far on the subject.Laist's book is extremely focused on four works - Americana, White Noise, Underworld, and Cosmopolis, and this intensity of focus allows him to really dig into DeLillo's complex metaphors and to find surprising and frequently amusing meanings contained within them.The most interesting innovation in Laist's discussion is the sustained investigation of what he calls an "interphorical" relationship between technology and human beings.Laist is a little overly-fond of coining neologisms, but the idea of an interphor - not a one-way metaphor, but a bidirectional, dialectical exchange of attributes - is extremely provocative and Laist uses it throughout his book as a model of how DeLillo envisions the relationship between his characters and their "technoscape," as Laist likes to say.(Although I kid Laist about his propensity to neologize, I also find myself using his words without realizing it.It is in fact part of Laist's point that DeLillo has to invent a whole new language to explain the new reality brought about by the widespread dissemination of unprecedented technologies.)Americana's David Bell and his movie camera, White Noise's Jack Gladney and his television set, Underworld's Nick Shay and his waste, Cosmoplis's Eric Packer and his various gadgets; Laist convincingly makes the case that these characters are connected to these objects in a way that disrupts classical formulations of the relationship between mind and matter.To boot, Laist's book is extremely funny.It is a little quirky - not quite your average scholarly tome, but a real product of love and enthusiasm.Edifying and delightful! ... Read more

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Don DeLillo once remarked to an interviewer that his intention is to use "the whole picture, the whole culture," of America. Since the publication of his first novel Americana in 1971, DeLillo has explored modern American culture through a series of acclaimed novels, including White Noise (1985; winner of the American Book Award), Libra (1988), and Underworld (1997).

For Mark Osteen, the most bracing and unsettling feature of DeLillo's work is that, although his fiction may satirize cultural forms, it never does so from a privileged position outside the culture. His work brilliantly mimics the argots of the very phenomena it dissects: violent thrillers and conspiracy theories, pop music, advertising, science fiction, film, and television. As a result, DeLillo has been read both as a denouncer and as a defender of contemporary culture; in fact, Osteen argues, neither description is adequate. DeLillo's dialogue with modern institutions, such as chemical companies, the CIA, and the media, respects their power and ingenuity while criticizing their dangerous consequences. Even as DeLillo borrows from their discourses, he maintains a tenaciously opposing stance toward the sources of collective power.

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some things are better than others
There's nothing like talking about the universe of the DeLillo. It's nice even uttering a few superficial lines about it. Let alone going fully crazy into the magnitude of textual depth that is possible, and even necessary, in a book-length rave.

I cannot say enough about DeLillo. Apparently, Osteen feels the same way. I would characterize the book as 'critical'. Not just abstractly critical, like 'this is some literary criticism'. But fully critical, like 'there are some extremely serious things happening, happened, will happen. And we need to talk, have talked, about them at a very serious level'. By serious I mean what DeLillo means when he says it took him a few books written to realize how serious we have to be about writing. Serious as in life-and-death struggle. There is nothing more important than life. The closer to consciousness things get, the more meaningful they are. We like to dive in to the flow of DeLillo-dreaming and let it wash over us as we bathe in it and drink it's revealing purity of intention/reality.

We're taking about DeLillo! For this we do not want un-inspire-ing people around. People who think his characters all talk the same, or his books aren't very emotion-causing. We simply want people like us, who-like-us, we want people, like I mean people whose visual resolution is high. Who can really see. Who are fully awake to what death has to take away. Yes, we'll be dead soon. Before then, please do not make me feel like I'm wasting my time. With the things you might say.

American Magic and Dread--a fairly suggestive title. Because DeLillo is american. That doesn't mean limited. It means the center, the solar furnace of the elements with which he designs life-forms, happens to be here, the richest nation ever, the nation at the swirling epic-center of the riskiest, most audacious project to control nature that people-kind has ever known. We're talking about total destruction, nukes on hair-trigger alert, never-ending. So, the apocalypse hasn't happened yet. Like the big media's haven't documented the literal hell-on-earth that is existence for most of the souls who live, animals trapped in the plot of human exploitation and abuse. Apparently DeLillo eats hamburgers. Maybe he's researching. He feels he needs to taste death in order to write books filled with torturers. Maybe he just doesn't care. Whatever the case, I'm not going to police his thoughts--I won't refuse to read him until he goes vegan. Zappa was a murderer. He smoked cigarettes. (Killing yourself is murder just as bad as killing someone else). And I listen to him whole-heartedly.

Smith says "Too much truth is a prescription for failure". He was talking about why DeLillo was not read as much as his total perfection of intelligent artistry called for with respect to size of readership. So, lots of people bought Underworld. But how many people read it? It's nice to imagine that there are multitudes of souls out there "real" enough to appreciate DeLillo. After all, if I can see his text's "burning light", why can't others? As Smith also says, "There is no such thing as a leaf--there are only leaves".

Osteen's work is the full deal. When reading it, I'll quit, becuase it's too good to read. Meaning, I can only integrate so much goodness at any one time. Sometimes I max out, and have to save stimuli for later. It's about how dense text is. How much meaning happens per alphabetic character. There has to be a limit. We know that DeLillo has flirted with this limit. Osteen does what he does fairly well. It may be wrong to say that fiction is better than criticism. Platonic. Ideals and whatnot. They're just things for different modes of you. Modes can be pretty demanding. Often I will be fully unable to deal w text. But like now i'll be textual. Lines will be life. Writing/reading will do it for me. I'll have things to say, I'll be willing to listen to writers' sayings. The question is, does Osteen do justice to D? Meaning D(eLillo) is so twisted and godly and surprising and new--does Osteen come close to whatever in the world kind of things we should be telling each other about D? With this book, do we reach conditions of remembrance of D-text that are equal more or less to the conditions we can reach in our own private ruminations? Does O let us trip? What is the quality of his dream-logic? Does he bring us down, or trip us out? Does he like it? Can he make his book sing? How far can he take us? Is it worth it, walking along with him for some of the times of our lives? With the things he might say? Text is drug. Is the drug mind-expanding? Is the book informational? Do we learn more reading it than we'd learn never reading it? In short, should we read American Magic and Dread? I wouldn't know. As Rilke says, "All critical intention is beyond me".

I just want to you to acquire some sensations feelings and thoughts. I care for you, because if I were you, I'd be you. I'd do what you're doing. I know you want to come and join in song. I know life is not long. It all depends, on how you'll make it through, the things you do, whether true, or too few. Please, give us a chance. Let us tell you things. Do not turn away--our song is not very long. You've come this far. Choose life, and not death. This may be a (difficult) problem. Or it may be effortless, like true love sometimes is. Only you can tell what's true. You shall decide what to let live. No matter what you do, the end will just be you. The life of love, it may take us far. Make your life reach the magic of love itself. ... Read more

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There is September 11 and then there are the days after, and finally the years. "Falling Man" begins in the smoke and ash of the burning towers and traces the aftermath of this global tremor in the intimate lives of a few people. First there is Keith, walking out of the rubble into a life that he'd always imagined belonged to everyone but him. Then Lianne, his estranged wife, memory-haunted, trying to reconcile two versions of the same shadowy man. And their small son Justin, standing at the window, scanning the sky for more planes. These are lives choreographed by loss, grief and the enormous force of history. Brave and brilliant, "Falling Man" traces the way the events of September 11 have reconfigured our emotional landscape, our memory and our perception of the world. It is beautiful, heartbreaking, cathartic. ... Read more

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A man sets out on an ordinary business trip to Valparaiso, Indiana. It turns out to be a mock-heroic journey toward identity and transcendence.

This is Don DeLillo's second play, and it is funny, sharp, and deep-reaching. Its characters tend to have needs and desires shaped by the forces of broadcast technology.

This is the way we talk to each other today. This is the way we tell each other things, in public, before listening millions, that we don't dare to say privately.

Nothing is allowed to be unseen. Nothing remains unsaid. And everything melts repeatedly into something else, as if driven by the finger on the TV remote.

This is also a play that makes obsessive poetry out of the language of routine airline announcements and the flow of endless information.

Valparaiso has been performed by the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and by the SteppenwolfTheatre Company in Chicago. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (11)

A little touch of the zeitgeist that I can easily live without
What a dud. Oh well. I hate most stage-plays anyway. As all the other reviewers have already said, VALPARAISO is about the mediacrization of everyday life. And it's typical DeLillo. Populated by cartoon characters who spout nonstop DeLilloisms.

Michael Majeski mentions a colleague with an "unnamed rare disease". Which harks back to a character in AMERICANA with "some blood thing". I'm convinced that Don is terrified of anything that remains unnamed & vague. Which explains why a schoolteachter in UNDERWORLD name-checks all the parts of a shoe. It's the schoolteacher's way of comforting Nick Shay. As if to say: life is a big fat mystery but it's not a total mystery.

There's a few good lines: "Moon-faced men and women with yearnings of epic dimension. I tell them I brush my teeth with Close-Up." And: "I sometimes think I'm clinically self-absorbed. A condition that ought to be covered by health insurance."

Don's assonance addiction is one of Planet Earth's major annoyances. It's every bit as unendurable as Bob Dylan's rhyme-addiction. VALPARAISO is chockful of phrases like "heaving mediocrity" and "slobber of the body" and "shuttle buggies" and "nuance of human sharing". If those sort of artsy-fartsy poetical sound-effects are your idea of fine quality entertainment, then you'll like VALPARAISO.

a blatantly obvious satire
Writing satire is fun and easy. As long as your work is satirical, you don't need real dialogue, well-formed characters, or an interesting plotline. Delillo satirizes the media, so he is allowed to get away with laughable dialogue and characters with one dimension (at best). I agree with another reviewer who said that Chuck Pahlaniuk's Survivor was superior to Valparaiso. Survivor, which also satirizes the role of the media in today's culture, is funnier, more inventive, and a much better read. Please do yourself a favor and skip this play. The only bright spot to reading it will be that while it will waste your time, due to its short length it will not waste too much of it.

An airplane trip to the inner self
"Valparaiso" is a play by Don DeLillo. According to the book's copyright page, the play was first performed in 1999 at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The play tells the story of Michael Majeski, a man who has attained celebrity status after an unusual journey: his business flight to Valparaiso, Indiana had become an unexpected odyssey that was both strange and ridiculous.

I read "Valparaiso" as a sometimes dark satire on television and the culture of instant celebrity. Majeski's story is also a reflection on individuality and free will (or the seeming lack thereof in the modern world). This is a surreal piece that is not, in my opinion, wholly effective, but nonetheless contains some sections with both real bite and pathos.

your culture or mine?
If you examine Mr. Delillo's body of work as a whole, each piece plays a part in defining his question: Where/how do we find/create meaning in contemporary society?

You (or I, on another day) may disagree with my supposition, and to be fair if his work can be pegged to a central premise, it is likely a tad more subtle and complex, but I think it is a good place to begin.

In Valparaiso, Delillo sends us on a preposterous postmodern journey to god knows where (only here, he situates god knows where in Chile).He grabs the uneasy in each of us and throws it up on the stage."Here, look at this: Remember how uncomfortable contemporary society can make you?When's the last time you had a meaningful conversation with your spouse?When's the last time you had a meaningful thought?"

Delillo adds depth to the otherwise hackneyed proposal that our `individuality' is merely a creation of our preferences as consumers. His characters here may not reveal their complex inner lives, but one suspects that they may be more than an amalgam of what they buy on Amazon or see on cable.

Sure maybe it's all affectation.Maybe D's being insincere in the way he poses the questions. I don't think so. I think what you'll find is a smartly crafted, mildly apocalyptic tale of suburban dis-ease. If it works well, you should feel a slight nausea at play's end.

Valparaiso is very much worth seeing performed by a smart group of actors.It is also very much worth reading.

The Way We Live Now
As other reviewers have noted, it is difficult to judge a work which is essentially a blueprint for an experience in another medium -- and perhaps unfair to judge it by the standards one applies to the medium the author is best known for. Ideally a play should do what *only* a play can do that no other medium can; Delillo understands this. Here his theme of media-saturated alienation finds a heightened, poetic expression, at once more theatrical, more immediate and more accessible than his novels. For those with a little imagination looking for a highly distilled dose of Delillo that really packs a punch, look no further. ... Read more

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