Don DeLillo has 20 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 25 narrators, with an average listener rating of 2.7★ across 102 ratings. The most-rated is The Chessmen.
The Chessmen
Summary
Living again off the Isle of Lewis, ex-detective inspector Fin Macleod is working as a security officer for a local landowner. While investigating illegal activity on the estate, Fin encounters the elusive poacher and former childhood friend and bandmate Whistler Macaskill. When Fin catches up with Whistler among the windswept hills of the estate, the two witness a freak natural phenomenon - a bog burst - that drains a loch of all its water in a flash, revealing a mud-encased light aircraft with a sickeningly familiar moniker on its side. Both men immediately know what they will find inside: the body of Roddy Mackenzie, a friend whose flight disappeared more than 17 years earlier. But when Whistler's face appears to register something other than shock, an icy chill of apprehension overtakes Fin. What secret has Whistler been hiding from him, and everyone else on the island? Fin is unprepared for how the truth about the past will alter the course of the future.
©2012 Peter May (P)2018 Hachette Audio
White Noise
Summary
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.
©1984, 1985 Don DeLillo (P)2016 Simon & Schuster
Underworld
Summary
Our lives, our half century. Nick Shay and Klara Sax knew each other once, intimately, and they meet again in the American desert. He is trying to outdistance the crucial events of his early life, haunted by the hard logic of loss and by the echo of a gunshot in a basement room. She is an artist who has made a blood struggle for independence. Don DeLillo's mesmerizing novel opens with a legendary baseball game played in New York in 1951. The glorious outcome - the home run that wins the game is called the Shot Heard Round the World - shades into the grim news that the Soviet Union has just tested an atomic bomb. The baseball itself, fought over and scuffed, generates the narrative that follows. It takes the reader deeply into the lives of Nick and Klara and into modern memory and the soul of American culture - from Bronx tenements to grand ballrooms to a B-52 bombing raid over Vietnam. A generation's master spirits come and go. Lennny Bruce cracking desperate jokes, Mick Jagger with his devil strut, J. Edgar Hoover in a sexy leather mask. And flashing in the margins of ordinary life are the curiously connectecd materials of the culture. Condoms, bombs, Chevy Bel Airs and miracle sites on the Web. Underworld is a story of men and women together and apart, seen in deep clear detail and in stadium-sized panoramas, shadowed throughout by the overarching conflict of the Cold War. It is a novel that accepts every challenge of these extraordinary times - Don DeLillo's greatest and most powerful work of fiction.
©1997 Don DeLillo (P)2011 Simon & Schuster
Libra
Summary
In this powerful, eerily convincing fictional speculation on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Don DeLillo chronicles Lee Harvey Oswald's odyssey from troubled teenager to a man of precarious stability who imagines himself an agent of history. When "history" presents itself in the form of two disgruntled CIA operatives who decide that an unsuccessful attempt on the life of the president will galvanize the nation against communism, the scales are irrevocably tipped. A gripping, masterful blend of fact and fiction, alive with meticulously portrayed characters both real and created, Libra is a grave, haunting, and brilliant examination of an event that has become an indelible part of the American psyche.
©1988 Don DeLillo (P)2016 Simon & Schuster
The Silence
Summary
From one of the most dazzling and essential voices in American fiction, a timely and compelling novel set in the near future about five people gathered together in a Manhattan apartment, in the midst of a catastrophic event. Don DeLillo completed this novel just weeks before the advent of Covid-19. The Silence is the story of a different catastrophic event. Its resonances offer a mysterious solace. It is Super Bowl Sunday in the year 2022. Five people, dinner, an apartment on the east side of Manhattan. The retired physics professor and her husband and her former student waiting for the couple who will join them from what becomes a dramatic flight from Paris. The conversation ranges from a survey telescope in north-central Chile to a favorite brand of bourbon to Einstein’s 1912 Manuscript on the Special Theory of Relativity. Then something happens and the digital connections that have transformed our lives are severed. What follows is a dazzling and profoundly moving conversation about what makes us human. Never has the art of fiction been such an immediate guide to our navigation of a bewildering world. Never have DeLillo’s prescience, imagination, and language been more illuminating and essential. “Mysterious...Unexpectedly touching...[DeLillo offers] consolation simply by enacting so well the mystery and awe of the real world.” (Joshua Ferris, The New York Times Book Review) “DeLillo [has] almost Dayglo powers as a writer.” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times) “Brilliant and astonishing…a masterpiece…manages to renew DeLillo’s longstanding obsessions while also striking deeply and swiftly at the reader’s emotions…The effect is transcendent.” (Charles Finch, Chicago Tribune) “Daring... provocative... exquisite...captures the swelling fears of our age.” (Ron Charles, The Washington Post)
©2020 Don DeLillo. All rights reserved. (P)2020 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.
Players
Summary
In Players, DeLillo explores the dark side of contemporary affluence and its discontents. Pammy and Lyle Wynant are an attractive, modern couple who seem to have it all. Yet behind their "ideal" life is a lingering boredom and quiet desperation: Their talk is mostly chatter, their sex life more a matter of obligatory "satisfaction" than pleasure. Then Lyle sees a man killed on the floor of the Stock Exchange and becomes involved with the terrorists responsible; Pammy leaves for Maine with a homosexual couple...and still they remain untouched, "players" indifferent to the violence that surrounds them and that they have helped to create. Originally published in 1977 (before his National Book Award-winning White Noise and the recent blockbuster Underworld), Players is a fast-moving yet starkly drawn socially critical drama that demonstrates the razor-sharp prose and thematic density for which DeLillo is renowned today. "The wit, elegance, and economy of Don DeLillo's art are equal to the bitter clarity of his perceptions" (The New York Times Book Review).
©1977 Don DeLillo (P)2018 Simon & Schuster Audio
Americana
Summary
At 28, David Bell is the American dream come true. He has fought his way to the top, surviving office purges and scandals to become a high-powered television executive. David's world is made up of the images that flicker across America's screens, the fantasies that enthrall America's imagination. And then the dream - and the dream making - become a nightmare. At the height of his success, David sets out to rediscover reality. Camera in hand, he journeys across the country in a mad and moving attempt to capture a sense of his own and his country's past, present, and future.
©1971 Don DeLillo. All rights reserved (P)2016 Simon & Schuster
Cosmopolis
Summary
It is an April day in the year 2000 and an era is about to end, those booming times of market optimism when the culture boiled with money and corporations seemed more vital and influential than governments. Eric Packer, a billionaire asset manager at age 28, emerges from his penthouse triplex and settles into his lavishly customized white stretch limousine. On this day he is a man with two missions: to pursue a cataclysmic bet against the yen and to get a haircut across town. His journey to the barbershop is a contemporary odyssey, funny and fast-moving. Stalled in traffic by a presidential motorcade, a music idol's funeral, and a violent political demonstration, Eric receives a string of visitors - his experts on security, technology, currency, finance, and theory. Sometimes he leaves the car for sexual encounters and sometimes he doesn't have to. Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo's 13th novel, is both intimate and global, a vivid and moving account of a spectacular downfall.
©2003 Don DeLillo (P)2003 Simon & Schuster, Inc. AUDIOWORKS is an imprint of Simon & Schuster Audio Division, Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Running Dog
Summary
DeLillo's Running Dog, originally published in 1978, follows Moll Robbins, a New York City journalist trailing the activities of an influential senator. In the process, she is dragged into the black market world of erotica and shady, infatuated men, where a cat-and-mouse chase for an erotic film rumored to “star” Adolph Hitler leads to trickery, maneuvering, and bloodshed. With streamlined prose and a thriller's narrative pace, Running Dog is a bright star in the modern master's early career.
©1978, 2012 Don DeLillo (P)2018 Simon & Schuster
Mao II
Summary
Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award "One of the most intelligent, grimly funny voices to comment on life in present-day America" (The New York Times), Don DeLillo presents an extraordinary new novel about words and images, novelists and terrorists, the mass mind and the archindividualist. At the heart of the book is Bill Gray, a famous reclusive writer who escapes the failed novel he has been working on for many years and enters the world of political violence, a nightscape of Semtex explosives and hostages locked in basement rooms. Bill's dangerous passage leaves two people stranded: his brilliant, fixated assistant, Scott; and the strange young woman who is Scott's lover - and Bill's.
©1991 Don DeLillo (P)2016 Simon & Schuster
Great Jones Street
Summary
From the author of White Noise (winner of the National Book Award) and Zero K Bucky Wunderlick, rock star and budding messiah, has hit a spiritual wall. In midtour he bolts from his band to hole up in a dingy East Village apartment and separate himself from the paranoid machine that propels the culture he has helped create. As faithful fans await messages, Bucky encounters every sort of roiling farce he is trying to escape. A penetrating look at rock and roll's merger of art, commerce, and urban decay, Great Jones Street "reflects our era's nightmares and hallucinations with all appropriate lurid, tawdry shades" (The Cleveland Plain Dealer).
©2017 Don DeLillo (P)2017 Simon & Schuster, Inc.
The Silence
Summary
It is Super Bowl Sunday in the year 2022. Five people are due to have dinner in an apartment on the east side of Manhattan. The hosts are a retired physics professor and her husband; they are joined by one of her former students and await the arrival of another couple, delayed by what becomes a dramatic flight from Paris. In the apartment, talk ranges widely. The opening kickoff is one commercial away. Then something happens, and the digital connections that have transformed our lives are severed. What follows is a dazzling and profoundly moving conversation about what makes us human. Never has the art of fiction been such an immediate guide to our navigation of a bewildering world. Never have DeLillo’s prescience, imagination and language been more illuminating and essential.
©2020 Don DeLillo (P)2020 Simon & Schuster
Zero K
Summary
The wisest, richest, funniest, and most moving novel in years from Don DeLillo, one of the great American novelists of our time - an ode to language, at the heart of our humanity, a meditation on death, and an embrace of life. Jeffrey Lockhart's father, Ross, is a billionaire in his 60s with a younger wife, Artis Martineau, whose health is failing. Ross is the primary investor in a remote and secret compound where death is exquisitely controlled and bodies are preserved until a future time when biomedical advances and new technologies can return them to lives of transcendent promise. Jeff joins Ross and Artis at the compound to say "an uncertain farewell" to her as she surrenders her body. "We are born without choosing to be. Should we have to die in the same manner? Isn't it a human glory to refuse to accept a certain fate?" These are the questions that haunt the novel and its memorable characters, and it is Ross Lockhart, most particularly, who feels a deep need to enter another dimension and awake to a new world. For his son, this is indefensible. Jeff, the book's narrator, is committed to living, to experiencing "the mingled astonishments of our time, here, on Earth". Don DeLillo's seductive, spectacularly observed, and brilliant new novel weighs the darkness of the world - terrorism, floods, fires, famine, plague - against the beauty and humanity of everyday life, love, awe, and "the intimate touch of earth and sun". Zero K is glorious.
©2016 Don DeLillo (P)2016 Simon & Schuster
El silencio
Summary
Domingo de la Super Bowl. Año 2022. Cinco amigos han quedado para cenar en un apartamento en Manhattan. Una profesora de Física jubilada, su esposo y su exalumno esperan a la pareja que se unirá a ellos tras un accidentado vuelo desde París. La conversación abarca desde las apuestas deportivas hasta el bourbon y el manuscrito de 1912 de Einstein sobre la teoría de la relatividad. De pronto, un apagón deja al mundo a oscuras y las conexiones digitales que han marcado nuestras vidas se cortan. Don DeLillo completó esta novela pocas semanas antes del advenimiento de la Covid-19. El silencio es la historia de una catástrofe diferente y una vuelta de tuerca al poshumanismo como tema central de su obra: si ya habíamos asimilado la tecnología como una parte esencial del ser humano, ¿qué queda de nosotros, de nuestra identidad, si nos vemos obligados a renunciar a ella? Desde el asesinato de Kennedy hasta el 11-S, DeLillo ha sabido reflejar en sus novelas los hechos que han marcado cada momento histórico. El silencio describe una sociedad cuya mayor amenaza ha dejado de ser algo tangible para convertirse en un enemigo invisible, ya sea una pandemia, un ataque informático o el caos financiero. Please note: This audiobook is in Spanish.
©2020 Don DeLillo (P)2020 Planeta Audio
The Angel Esmeralda
Summary
From one of the greatest writers of our time, his first collection of short stories, written between 1979 and 2011, chronicling - and foretelling - three decades of American life. Set in Greece, the Caribbean, Manhattan, a white-collar prison, and outer space, these nine stories are a mesmerizing introduction to Don DeLillo’s iconic voice, from the rich, startling, jazz-infused rhythms of his early work to the spare, distilled, monastic language of the later stories. In "Creation", a couple at the end of a cruise somewhere in the West Indies can’t get off the island—flights canceled, unconfirmed reservations, a dysfunctional economy. In "Human Moments in World War III", two men orbiting the earth, charged with gathering intelligence and reporting to Colorado Command, hear the voices of American radio, from a half century earlier. In the title story, Sisters Edgar and Grace, nuns working the violent streets of the South Bronx, confirm the neighborhood's miracle, the apparition of a dead child, Esmeralda. Nuns, astronauts, athletes, terrorists, and travelers, the characters in The Angel Esmeralda propel themselves into the world and define it. DeLillo’s sentences are instantly recognizable, as original as the splatter of Jackson Pollock or the luminous rectangles of Mark Rothko. These nine stories describe an extraordinary journey of one great writer whose prescience about world events and ear for American language changed the literary landscape.
©2011 Don DeLillo (P)2011 Simon & Schuster, Inc
Ratner's Star
Summary
One of DeLillo's first novels, Ratner's Star follows Billy, a genius adolescent who is recruited to live in obscurity, underground, as he tries to help a panel of estranged, demented, and yet lovable scientists communicate with beings from outer space. It is a mix of quirky humor, science, and mathematical theories as well as the complex emotional distance and sadness people feel. Ratner's Star demonstrates both the thematic and prosaic muscularity that typifies DeLillo's later and more recent works, like The Names.
©2017 Don DeLillo (P)2017 Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Pafko at the Wall
Summary
"There's a long drive. It's gonna be. I believe. The Giants win the pennant. The Giants win the pennant. The Giants win the pennant. The Giants win the pennant." (Russ Hodges, October 3, 1951) On the 50th anniversary of "The Shot Heard Round the World", Don DeLillo reassembles in fiction the larger-than-life characters who on October 3, 1951, witnessed Bobby Thomson's pennant-winning home run in the bottom of the ninth inning. Jackie Gleason is razzing Toots Shor in Leo Durocher's box seats; J. Edgar Hoover, basking in Sinatra's celebrity, is about to be told that the Russians have tested an atomic bomb; and Russ Hodges, raw-throated and excitable, announces the game - the Giants and the Dodgers at the Polo Grounds in New York. DeLillo's transcendent account of one of the iconic events of the 20th century is a masterpiece of American sportswriting.
©1997 Don DeLillo. Originally published as the prologue to Underworld, ©1997 Don DeLillo; published by Scribner. Commissioned by 92nd Street Y as a live reading produced by Bernard Schwartz in 92Y’s Kaufmann Concert Hall on October 3, 2019. All rights reserved. 2019 The Young Men's and Women's Hebrew Association. All rights reserved. (P)1997 Simon & Schuster Audio
Falling Man
Summary
In the opening scene of Falling Man, Keith Neudecker emerges from the smoke and ash of the burning tower where he worked and makes his way to the apartment of his ex-wife and young son uptown. Throughout this bold and haunting novel, DeLillo traces the way the events of September 11 kindled or rekindled relationships, reconfigured our emotional landscape, our memory, and our perception of the world. Falling Man is a direct encounter with the enormous force of history, yet the story is told through the intimate lives of a few people immediately affected. It is beautiful, heartbreaking, and ultimately redemptive.
©2007 Don DeLillo. All rights reserved (P)2007 Simon and Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.
The Names
Summary
Set against the backdrop of a lush and exotic Greece, The Names is considered the book that began to drive "sharply upward the size of his readership" (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Among the cast of DeLillo's bizarre yet fully realized characters in The Names are Kathryn, the narrator's estranged wife; their son, the six-year-old novelist; Owen, the scientist; and the neurotic narrator obsessed with his own neuroses. A thriller, a mystery, and still a moving examination of family, loss, and the amorphous and magical potential of language itself, The Names stands with any of DeLillo's more recent and highly acclaimed works.
©1989 Don DeLillo (P)2017 Simon & Schuster Audio
The Body Artist
Summary
In this spare, seductive novel, Don DeLillo inhabits the muted world of Lauren Hartke, an artist whose work defies the limits of the body. Lauren is living on a lonely coast, in a rambling rented house, where she encounters a strange, ageless man, a man with uncanny knowledge of her life. Together they begin a journey into the wilderness of time - time, love, and human perception.
©2001 Don DeLillo, All Rights Reserved (P)2001 Simon & Schuster Inc., All Rights Reserved