Icon: Don DeLillo

The best way to look at Don DeLillo's new collection of short stories is as a tour through one of the most fertile literary careers of the past 40 years. It's hard to believe, but DeLillo published his first book way back in 1971, and the stories in The Angel Esmeralda cover almost that entire stretch, from 1979-2011. DeLillo makes theses nine stories feel large, and they encompass his best themes: terror... and its handmaiden, politics; plus technology, pop culture, and, of course, the absurd. "Creation," published in 1979, strikes a Beckettian note as it details the seductions between a man and a woman stuck waiting for a plane that won't come. It recalls DeLillo's early absurdist novels (1978's Running Dog revolves around a sex tape made in Hitler's bunker), even as its condensed intensity offers the characteristic smack that DeLillo has become a master of delivering. "Baader-Meinhof" (2002) is one of DeLillo's prototypically rich readings of a graphic artist this time it's Gerhard Richter, whose paintings of the titular terro-anarchist group's prison-cell suicides force out some of DeLillo's most intense descriptions: "The woman's reality, the head, the neck, the rope burn, the hair, the facial features, were painted, picture to picture, in nuances of obscurity and pall, a detail clearer here than there, the slurred mouth in one painting appearing nearly natural elsewhere, all of it unsystematic." And the blackly humorous "Human Moments in World War III" (1983) tells the story of two astronauts viewing an Earth where "the banning of nuclear weapons has made the world safe for war." Although DeLillo ranges broadly through these four decades of fiction, he always comes back to a question found in "The Starveling" (2011): "If we're not here to know what a thing is, then what is it?" DeLillo's stories derive a rich, cosmic energy from the search for this unquantifiable quantity, this little something that haunts each of these well-honed tales. DeLillo's search for it is a necessary, and undeniably beautiful, investigation.

This enormous counter-history of America from 1950 to 2000 summons words like epic, massive and astonishing, but they barely seem capable of describing DeLillo's masterpiece. Its intricate plot starts with a boy who catches Bobby Thomson's infamous home run to win the pennant for the Brooklyn Dodgers, known as "The Shot Heard 'Round the World." Throughout the novel, the ball pops up again and again, 40 years later coming into the hands... of one Nick Shay, an executive responsible for finding places to stick the nuclear waste left over from the cold war arms race. Between the ball's two owners DeLillo fits a history of the America that's rarely seen, an underworld filled with paranoid conspiracies, bohemian artists and the government's dirty little secrets. "Everyday things represent the most overlooked knowledge," says one character, and in Underworld DeLillo reveals all the common little unseen things that go into making America what it really is.

Widely recognized as DeLillo's most accessible, crowd-pleasing novel, White Noise stars Jack Gladney, a professor who's gained fame for his invention of "Hitler Studies" at "the College-on-a-Hill." When Gladney's obsessive fear of death is exacerbated by his exposure to DeLillo's now infamous "airborne toxic event," he seeks solace in the anti-anxiety drug Dylar. Although the popularization of mood-altering drugs like Ritalin and Paxil was a decade away when he published this 1985... National Book Award winner, DeLillo was ahead of the curve as always. Here he's warning Americans about the looming drug culture, as well as meditating on its deeper connection to the environmental degradation and media-stoked fears that helped create an anxious middle class in search of relief. Filled with eerily real scenes ripped from Hollywood disaster movies and charting the progress of a nation well on its way to living in a media-saturated world, White Noise remains one of DeLillo's most relevant and most potent creations.

Written 35 years after JFK died, Libra is DeLillo's imaginative rendition of a world where Lee Harvey Oswald was sent by the CIA to kill the nation's President. DeLillo counterpoints this tale with the contemporary story of an archivist named Nicholas Branch, whose job it is to piece together the fragments of evidence surrounding Kennedy's death. Looking deeply into notions of paranoia, conspiracy and how history is written, Libra investigates significant issues... surrounding one huge, very American question: are our lives as self-determined as our ideas of freedom and liberty would like us to believe? It's also DeLillo's most penetrating account of how government can fall prey to group-think and misinformation, and how the person at the top the President can be isolated on a "summit of unknowing" and suffer the dire consequences that come with being shielded from the truth.

It took DeLillo six years to deliver his long-awaited 9/11 book, but far from a sign of weakness, this slow gestation is in service of his point: traumatized and repressed, America is struggling to talk honestly and directly about 9/11. Fittingly, the drama in Falling Man surrounds a separated couple trying to find the words to reignite their love after the husband has a brush with death when the Towers fall. But... DeLillo's creepily quiet post-9/11 New York City is far from a city for lovers. The author richly evokes the numbed, anesthetized feeling virtually every American experienced in the days following 9/11, and his book becomes both a bracing portrait of those difficult, wayward times, and a critique of our collective response to the trauma. If DeLillo doesn't offer any easy answers, he does give us a necessary reminder of how important it is that we continue to look for them: Falling Man ends eerily with the 2002 Iraq War protests, a grim warning of the strange new world we all inherited after the attacks and that history doesn't stop just because a powerful nation wants it to.

Written in the shadow of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, Mao II is DeLillo's stinging rebuke to those who claim that novels have lost their relevance in an age of TV, film, the Internet, and terrorism. The book involves Bill Gray, a reclusive, celebrated novelist with a severe case of writer's block. Filled with fear that terrorists have taken over the writer's job of making "raids on consciousness," Gray gets a chance... to banish his demons when he volunteers to negotiate with a Middle Eastern terrorist group that has kidnapped a writer. A stirring deconstruction and juxtaposition of art and terror, Mao II is DeLillo's examination of the reliance of each on public figures, be it terrorists in adulation to Osama bin Laden or fervent readers, critics, and publishers dedicated to their favorite author. Frequently provocative and never dull, Mao II remains relevant and timely for DeLillo's artful probing of this tense, uncertain relationship between masses and their leader. He reveals some frightening commonalities between the highs of art and the lows of demagogues as well as what will never be reconciled between them.

If Falling Man was DeLillo's foray into 9/11, Point Omega is his adventure through the mind of the George W. Bush Administration. DeLillo's most recent novel and also his shortest it centers around two odd men: experimental filmmaker Jim Finley and the man he wants to document, Richard Elster, who has fled deep into to the California desert after his plans for a "haiku war" in Iraq go seriously off course. Deep... at the center of this terse, aphoristic book is the idea of a "virtual" war, one fought with remote controlled drone planes, broadcast into American living rooms by embedded journalists, and sold to the public like a product. Point Omega is DeLillo's meditation on the resemblances between such a war and the constructions of Hollywood cinema, and with it he poses crucial questions about the responsibilities of those who design our increasingly virtual world. It's DeLillo's take on an America that has radically changed in a post-9/11, Internet-wired era, and as ever he remains a prophet and a sage.