Mao II - by Don Delillo (Paperback)

About the Book

"One of the most ironic, intelligent, grimly funny voices to comment on life in present-day America" (The New York Times), Don DeLillo presents an extraordinary new novel about novelists and terrorists, the mass mind and the arch individualist. A love triangle that moves from New York to London to Beirut, Mao II tells an intimate story of faith, longing and redemption.

Book Synopsis

WINNER OF THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD - A profound novel about art, terror, masses, and the individual, from the National Book Award-winning author of White Noise, "one of the most ironic, intelligent, grimly funny voices to comment on life in present-day America" (The New York Times)

"This novel's a beauty. A vision as bold and a voice as eloquent and morally focused as any in American writing."--Thomas Pynchon

Bill Gray, a famous, reclusive novelist, emerges from his isolation when he becomes the key figure in an event staged to force the release of a poet hostage in Beirut. As Bill enters the world of political violence, a nightscape of Semtex explosives and hostages locked in basement rooms, his dangerous passage leaves two people stranded: his brilliant, fixated assistant, Scott, and the strange young woman who is Scott's lover--and Bill's.

An extraordinary novel about words and images, novelists and terrorists, the mass mind and the arch-individualist, Mao II is the work of an ingenious writer at the height of his powers.

Review Quotes

"The writing is dazzling; the images, so radioactive that they glow afterward in our minds."--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"If Don DeLillo has not yet been canonized as the leading American novelist, it will happen. The man is brilliant and daring . . . and Mao II is one of his best books."--The Washington Post Book World

"This novel's a beauty . . . DeLillo takes us on a breathtaking journey, beyond the official versions of our daily history, behind all easy assumptions about who we're supposed to be, with a vision as bold and a voice as eloquent and morally focused as any in American writing."--Thomas Pynchon

"A mordantly funny, casually prescient, hypnotically condensed novel . . . It is short, loosely plotted but simultaneously tight as a drum . . . Mao II goes beyond the easy tack of offering art as some humanistic antidote to terror, and instead delineates their uneasy commonalities." --Granta

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.