Don DeLillo

Stacey Olster is Professor of English at the State University of Stony Brook, USA. She is the author of Reminiscence and Re-Creation in Contemporary American Fiction (1989) and The Trash Phenomenon: Contemporary Literature, Popular Culture, and the Making of the American Century (2003), and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to John Updike (2006).

This is a beautifully coherent collection of essays on DeLillo's three most important recent novels. It is also much more than that. The volume reflects on, tells us much about, and revises views of, DeLillo's entire oeuvre, American literature and culture broadly, modernist and postmodernist theory, and the other arts (including photography, performance art, film). Anyone with any interest in contemporary culture should know this book. Led by the level-setting eloquent and erudite Olster, the contributors comprise the most exciting scholars in American literary and cultural studies today. Fittingly for a volume on DeLillo, reading it you will never forget that these are people who can write.

• Introduction; PART I: Mao II; Introduction; 1. Mao II, Apocalypse (When?), and Millennial Frenzy David Cowart; 2. Mao II, and the New Economic World Order, Peter Knight; 3. Mao II and Mixed Media, Laura Barrett; PART II: Underworld; Introduction; 4. Underworld and the End of the Cold War Narrative, Thomas Hill Schaub; 5. Underworld and the Architecture of Urban Space, David L. Pike; 6. Underworld, Ethnicity, and Outsider Art Josephine Gattuso Hendin; PART III. Falling Man; Introduction; 7. Falling Man and the Novel of Terrorism, John Carlos Rowe; 8. Falling Man, Trauma, and the Gendered Response, Linda Kauffman; 9. Falling Man and Performance Art, John N. Duvall; Notes on Contributors; Further Reading; Index.