Libra - by Don Delillo (Paperback)

About the Book

On November 22, 1963, in the streets of Dallas, Lee Harvey Oswald's path intersected with the President John F. Kennedy's and the world witnessed the terrifying explosion of America's dreams. In Libra Don DeLillo applies his masterful imagination to Kennedy's assassination and crestes eerily convincing speculation about one of America's most compelling mysteries.

Book Synopsis

From the author of the National Book Award-winning novel White Noise comes an eerily convincing fictional speculation on the events leading up to the assassination of John F. Kennedy

In this powerful, unsettling novel, 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.

Review Quotes

Praise for Libra

Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction

"[DeLillo's] richest novel . . . It's in commonplace moments that [he] reveals his genius . . . a triumph."
--Anne Tyler, The New York Times

"Much of DeLillo's earlier fiction now seems a brilliant prelude to [this novel] . . . Libra displays his genius for creative paranoia: he fills the gaps in the record with his imagination, spinning a brilliant web out of a heap of improbable coincidences."
--London Review of Books

"[Libra] is like a stop-motion frame of the crossfire, a still picture of an awful moment . . . DeLillo's prose has a quality of demented lyricism."
--The New Yorker

"Extraordinary intensity . . . unforgiving thoroughness . . . DeLillo has created a thriller of the most profound sort . . . Libra is electrifying, a book alive with suggestion."
--Chicago Tribune

"Libra operates at a dizzyingly high level of intensity throughout; it's that true fictional rarity--a novel of admirable depth and relevance that's also a terrific page-turner."
--USA Today

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.