Great Jones Street - by Don Delillo (Paperback)

About the Book

Originally published: Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1973.

Book Synopsis

From the author of the National Book Award-winning White Noise comes a novel that "reflects our era's nightmares and hallucinations with all appropriate lurid, tawdry shades" (The Cleveland Plain Dealer)

A thought-provoking exploration of the alluring yet hollow world of rock and roll stardom.

Bucky Wunderlick, rock star and budding messiah, has hit a spiritual wall. Unfulfilled by the excess of fame and fortune his revolutionary image has wrought, he bolds from his band mid-tour to hole up in a dingy East Village apartment, where he breaks away from his manufactured persona and separates himself from the toxic and superficial culture he has helped create.

As faithful fans await messages, Bucky encounters every sort of roiling farce he is trying to escape. Don DeLillo's Great Jones Street is a penetrating look at rock and roll's merger of art, commerce, and urban decay through a vivid portrait of a troubled rock star's search for meaning beyond the glitz and glamor.

Review Quotes

Praise for Great Jones Street

"Brilliant . . . deeply shocking . . . [DeLillo] looks at rock music, nihilism and urban decay."
--Diane Johnson, The New York Review of Books

"Luminous . . . finally, a novel that understands rock and roll!"
--Jon Pareles, The Village Voice

"DeLillo has the force and imagination of Thomas Pynchon or John Barth, with a sense of proportion and style which these would-be giants often lack."
--Irish Times

"[A] wild comic [vision] of a post-'60s America as medieval hellscape."
--Vulture

About the Author

Don DeLillo has written seventeen novels, including White Noise, which won the National Book Award. It was followed by Libra, his bestselling novel about the assassination of President Kennedy; Mao II, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction; and the bestselling Underworld, which in 2000 won the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for the most distinguished work of fiction published in the prior five years. In 1999, DeLillo was awarded the Jerusalem Prize, given to a writer whose work expresses the theme of freedom of the individual in society. His other books include the novels Cosmopolis, Falling Man, and Point Omega and the story collection The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories. He has also written occasional essays and three stage plays. In 2010 DeLillo became the third author to receive the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. He was awarded the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction in 2013.