The Silence

Don DeLillo completed The Silence just weeks before the devastating advent of Covid-19. This timely and compelling novel is the story of a different catastrophic event.

An apocalyptic novel for our times

The Silenc e is a horrifyingly resonant book

Slim and timely

[DeLillo] is our laureate of paranoia and dread . . . [ The Silence ] is a pristine disaster novel . . . his best writing
here reminds us that, as he puts it . . . “Life can get so interesting that we forget to be afraid”

DeLillo’s mastery of the fragmented nature of spoken language is displayed in these paranoiac
blurts, which every years seem less paranoiac . . . [a] brilliant, brief tale

DeLillo is a master stylist, and not a word goes to waste

Few people write as gorgeously as DeLillo can

The Silence is DeLillo distilled . . . a straight shot of the good stuff

A swift and searing haunting of a novel. An encapsulation of our continuing crisis of aberration and pause. The Silence is prime DeLillo.

In this wry and cutting meditation on collective loss, a rupture severs us, suddenly, from everything we’ve come to rely on. The Silence seems to absorb DeLillo’s entire body of work and sand it into stone or crystal.

Don DeLillo is the author of numerous novels including White Noise , Libra , Underworld , Falling Man and Zero K . He has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the PEN/Saul Bellow Award, the Jerusalem Prize for his complete body of work and the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His story collection, The Angel Esmeralda , was a finalist for the Story Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In 2013, DeLillo was awarded the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, and in 2015, the National Book Foundation awarded DeLillo its Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.