Originally read on October 12, 2012, reviewed on Goodreads.
★★★★
224 pages, Hardcover
First published November 1, 2011
“People say great art is immortal. I say there's something mortal in it. It carries a glimpse of death.”
― Don DeLillo, The Angel Esmeralda
Don Delillo is one of those writers who either hits a home run with me or hits a series of amazing fouls. [book:Mao II|402] made me want to be a writer. [book:White Noise|11762] pretty much convinced me I would never be good enough. Reading these 9 stories that span about 30 odd years it is clear that Delillo is a master of the literary universe. There are stories that seem to anticipate disaster and others that seem to translate the quiet terror of the present into more than words. It is like there is a hidden text behind the stories that is just sitting there smelling you as you apprehensivly read page after page. This isn't horror, this is a quiet hidden anxiety/terror that dances just out of site. It is the mood of David Lynch with the prose of Proust. I loved almost all the stories, except for the last. It ended with a whimper, but this was still an amazing collection of Delillo caught in fragments at his best.
Stories (I’ll review them individually later):
"Creation" (1979)
"Human Moments in World War III" (1983)
"The Runner" (1988)
"The Ivory Acrobat" (1988)
"The Angel Esmeralda" (1995)
"Baader-Meinhof" (2002)
"Midnight in Dostoevsky" (2009)
"Hammer and Sickle" (2010)
"The Starveling" (2011)