White Noise -- Don Delillo, Paperback

Winner of the National Book Award - an "eerie, brilliant, and touching" (New York Times) family drama about mass culture and the numbing effects of technology, from the author of The Silence

Jack Gladney teaches Hitler studies at a liberal arts college in Middle America where his colleagues include New York expatriates who want to immerse themselves in American magic and dread. Jack and his fourth wife, Babette, bound by their love, fear of death, and four ultramodern offspring, navigate the usual rocky passages of family life to the background babble of brand-name consumerism.

Then a lethal black chemical cloud floats over their lives, an airborne toxic event unleashed by an industrial accident. The menacing cloud is a more urgent and visible version of the white noise engulfing the Gladney family--radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, ultrasonic appliances, and TV murmerings--pulsing with life, yet heralding the danger of death.

Author: Don Delillo
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 01/07/1986
Pages: 336
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.51lbs
Size: 7.72h x 5.10w x 0.63d
ISBN: 9780140077025
Age Range: 18-UP

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 11/15/1985
Newsweek 09/08/2008 pg. 12
Newsweek 04/20/2009 pg. 10
Chronicle of Higher Education 08/07/2009 pg. 16

About the Author

Don DeLillo is the author of sixteen novels, including Zero K, Underworld, Falling Man, White Noise, and Libra. He has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize for his complete body of work, and the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2010, he was awarded the PEN/Saul Bellow Prize. The Angel Esmeralda was a finalist for the 2011 Story Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In 2012, DeLillo received the Carl Sandburg Literary Award for his body of work.