Staff Pick
A thoroughly endearing and post-modern examination of family, consumerism, truth, and dread/death anxiety. The hilarious cast of characters' confusion about everyday events becomes increasingly relatable as you read on! Fun and good! Recommended By Adam B., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Winner of the National Book Award, 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.
Review
"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
Review
"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
Review
"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." Los Angeles Times
Review
"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
Review
"A stunning performance from one of our most intelligent novelists....Tremendously funny." The New Republic
Synopsis
The National Book Award-winning classic from the author of Underworld and Libra, soon to be 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 sixty-five 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.
About the Author
Don DeLillo published his first short story when he was twenty-three years old. He has since written twelve 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 also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.