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.

It's hard to imagine, but Hemingway's magnum opus was originally tiled Fiesta and was actually published as such in the U.K.: a party could hardly be farther from the manic cycles of depression and forced euphoria that Papa so lovingly subjects his Lost Generation characters to. One imagines him saying it with a resigned, downtrodden air, this fiesta being one in which an impotent man loses his masculine girlfriend to a young... Spanish bullfighter. By whatever name, The Sun Also Rises is a singular book. What sets it apart aside from the gender-bending, the show-stopping portrait of pre-war Spain, and the catatonic understatement throughout is the remarkable intimacy Hemingway sustains across the book's numerous key characters. That alone would be mastery enough, but Hemingway goes us one better, conjuring this intimacy out of the barest of prose, certainly the best available example of the author's noted "iceberg" theory. It's also a very strange book, with Brett (the masculine girlfriend) as one of Hemingway's most enigmatic characters, (the most outstanding example of Hemingway's "bitch women," as one critic called her). Likewise, her scorned lover, Jake, has been taken for Hemingway himself, a pure sublimation of all the fears of emasculation and impotence that would dog him for life. What ties it all together is the very true depiction of the quiet suffering amidst the party life of interwar Paris that has come to define Hemingway's generation. It's a brisk, discordant read, certainly Hemingway's best. As an added audio bonus, the perfectly sculpted dialog sings in William Hurt's spot-on narration.

In a very literal sense, For Whom the Bell Tolls is about a man who needs to blow up a bridge; but in an equally real sense, it's about a man who needs to come to terms with death. Quiet American hero and all-around badass Robert Jordan travels to Spain to wage the good war with the Republicans against the Fascists, and he is sent on a virtual suicide mission deep into... the mountains to detonate a key bridge. In the four days that follow, he falls in love, drinks a lot of wine, and makes peace with his maker. For Whom the Bell Tolls may be Hemingway's tautest war novel the famous scene of mass execution in the beautiful Ronda alone is worth the price of admission and also, linguistically, his strangest. His use of the word thou to mimic the Spanish tu has been widely discussed, as has his use of purposely archaic language to make his English sound foreign. It all gets a little too close to self-parody when Hemingway translates his foul-mouthed Spaniards' constant refrain "me cago en la leche" as "I obscenity in the milk," yet in the end the weirdness only serves to make Hemingway's account of the Spanish Civil War that much more compelling. Perhaps the only writer who could pull off such awkwardly translated vulgarity, he does it with a brio that meshes brilliantly with his typically spare prose, delivering a war novel that is at once touching, red-blooded, poignant, and, fundamentally, existentially black.

Few authors loved the hard, sad ending as much as Hemingway did, and he certainly was at his hardest and saddest in this book. Ambulance driver Frederic Henry falls in love with nurse Catherine Barkley amidst the collapse of the Italian army at Caporetto during World War I. Heeding love over duty, he deserts, avoids execution by the slimmest of margins, and escapes with Catherine to Switzerland. After an idyllic several months,... Catherine goes into labor with their baby and Hemingway delivers his soul-flooring ending. At once a study of one man's very personal tragedy against the anonymity of tragedy of a world war, a muscular and masculine love story, and a sort of prequel to The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms depicts war at its most existentially absurd. It also offers the chance to experience one of the most famous last lines in all of literature. In an oft-quoted interview with The Paris Review he claims to have written that ending some 30 times before getting it right, but get it right he did.

Hemingway famously took his own life in 1961 after becoming a broken, depressed man were it not for this book, he might have done so 10 years earlier. Credited for earning Hemingway the 1954 Nobel Prize, this allegorical tale might just be the greatest comeback novel of all time. After the grand failure that was the disastrous Across the River and into the Trees, Hemingway was about to turn in his typewriter... instead he hammered out this taut story of an aged fisherman who has gone nearly three months without a single catch. Hooking a huge marlin after 85 days of failure, Santiago battles it for two days and two nights yet it is only after he catches his longed-for prey that Hemingway takes the book into entirely new territory. Critics have long drawn associations between Santiago and Hemingway, as well as the vast sea and the author's roiling unconscious, yet despite the consensus on some things, few books in Hemingway's body of work have inspired such hot debates. Is the book the perfect, fable-like distillation of Hemingway's style, or an overwrought exoticization of a Cuban fisherman? Perhaps in the end The Old Man and the Sea is a little of both, which only makes it that much more necessary. Read it to see Hemingway's final word on manhood a question that he wrestled with for his entire life as well as to see close up what might be called "elevated" Hemingway: the late, baroque style of a literary giant who knows he has nearly reached the end of his career.

Forget the fact that this book is the biggest nostalgia-fest ever and that Hemingway is lying through his teeth when he claims as a young man in Paris, "I was poor and very happy" (perhaps he was happy, but this trust-fund baby was not poor); read it simply because it is the most perfect, most idealized depiction of a youthful writer that you will ever see. It's all the more poignant when... you consider that Hemingway wrote this book about his very happy, very young memories of Paris while he was a very unhappy, very old man living in Idaho and Cuba. There are sublime passages here about nothing more complex than watching Paris wake up in the bohemian Saint Germain neighborhood, seeing fishermen pull their daily catch from the Seine, and enjoying the simple pleasure of one's first meal in two days. Juxtaposed with these nave passages is the subtle score-settling of a man who has become a literary giant: the gentle toppling of his mentor Gertrude Stein, a surprisingly fair image of Ezra Pound, and a merciless account of a drink with Ford Maddox Ford ("I always held my breath when I was near him in a closed room"). Most of all, this book should be read for its depiction of the romantic writer's life, surely embellished beyond belief, but sounding all the better for it: "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know."

Needless to say, Hemingway's sudden suicide left his literary estate in great disarray, prompting a flood of posthumous releases. (One count totaled more than 300 unpublished manuscripts at the time of his death.) Although many of these releases have been curiosities rightly swept beneath the sands of time, The Nick Adams Stories have, thankfully, endured. These 24 stories first published together in 1972 offer a version of Hemingway known as Nick Adams.... Arranged chronologically to follow Nick's life, they offer a rare look into Hemingway's early twentieth-century middle America, which makes a fine comparison to his better-known accounts of Europe. Rather than Hemingway's familiar revolutionaries and Lost Generation Parisians here we see rail-riding hobos, Chicago gangsters, and, of course, one Nick Adams, trying to come to terms with the chaos and emptiness of a rural America turning modern. Set mostly in the still-unsettled upper Michigan, these stories can be grisly, as with "Three Shots" where a Native American wife gets a C-section, only to have her own throat slit by her husband. Yet others, like "Big Two-Hearted River," are in the best tradition of Hemingway's stoic pastoralism, where the titular river allows Hemingway to elegant portray the dark recesses of Nick's mind. Another standout is "The Killers," which charts Nick's abrupt coming-of-age during a Chicago gangland murder and about which Hemingway himself said, "That story probably had more left out of it than anything I ever wrote." While not quite as good as Hemingway's wartime novels, this solid, satisfying collection nonetheless fills a gap in the writer's oeuvre and has let a few more of Papa's short masterpieces see the light of day.