White Noise - (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) 25th Edition by Don Delillo (Paperback)

About the Book

From a National Book Award-winning author comes this postmodern masterpiece. After a deadly toxic accident and his wife's addiction to an experimental drug, a man is forced to question everything about his life.

Book Synopsis

The National Book Award-winning classic by the author of Underworld and Libra, featuring an introduction by Richard Powers, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory and Playground

Now a major motion picture starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig

White Noise tells the story of Jack Gladney, his fourth wife, Babette, and four ultra­modern offspring as they navigate the rocky passages of family life to the background babble of brand-name consumerism. When an industrial accident unleashes an "airborne toxic event," a lethal black chemical cloud floats over their lives. The menacing cloud is a more urgent and visible version of the "white noise" engulfing the Gladneys--radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, ultrasonic appliances, and TV murmurings--pulsing with life, yet suggesting something ominous.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Review Quotes

"Though it's pitched at a level of absurdity slightly above that of real life, White Noise captures the quality of daily existence in media-saturaated, hyper capitalistic postmodern America so precisely, you don't know whether to laugh or whimper." --Lev Grossman, Time

"I can't think of a few books written in my lifetime that have received such quick and wise acclaim while going on to exercise so deep an influence for decades thereafter. I can think of even fewer books more likely to remain essential guides to life in the Information Age, another quarter century one." --Richard Powers

"One of the most ironic, intelligent, grimly funny voices to comment on life in present-day America . . . [White Noise] poses inescapable questions with consummate skill."--Jayne Anne Phillips, The New York Times Book Review

"DeLillo's eighth novel should win him wide recognition as one of the best American noveslists. . . . the homey comedy of White Noise invites us into a world we're glad to enter. Then the sinister buzz of implication makes the book unforgettably disturbing."--Newsweek

"A stunning book . . . it is a novel of hairline prophecy, showing a desolate and all-too-believable future in the evidence of an all-too-recognizable present. . . . Through tenderness, wit, and a powerful irony, DeLillo has made every aspect of White Noise a moving picture of a disquiet we seem to share more and more."--Los Angeles Times

"White Noise captures the quality of daily existence in media-saturated, hyper-capitalistic postmodern America so precisely, you don't know whether to laugh or whimper."--Time

"DeLillo is a prodigiously gifted writer. His cool but evocative prose is witty, biting, surprising, precise . . . White Noise [is] arguably [his] best novel."--The Washington Post

"Its brilliance is dark and sheathed. And probing. In White Noise, Don DeLillo takes a Geiger-counter reading of the American family, and comes up with ominous clicks."--Vanity Fair

"A stunning performance from one of our most intelligent novelists . . . Tremendously funny."--The New Republic

"DeLillo's love and flair for language unite to tell us [...] something discomforting about mortality and something profound about the way we deal with it. It may be a novel superabounding with words, but none of them are wasted."--The Guardian

About the Author

Don DeLillo published his first short story when he was twenty-three years old. He has since written more than a dozen novels, including White Noise (1985), which won the National Book Award. It was followed by Libra (1988), his novel about the assassination of President Kennedy, and by Mao II, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In 1997 he published the bestselling Underworld, and in 1999 he was awarded the Jerusalem Prize, given to a writer whose work expresses the theme of the freedom of the individual in society; he was the first American author to receive it. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Richard Powers (introduction) is the author of more than a dozen novels, including the Pulitzer Prize winner The Overstory and the National Book Award winner The Echo Maker. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, he lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.