Underworld: A Novel

Don DeLillo's novel opens with a legendary baseball game played in New York in 1951. The glorious outcome - the home run that wins the game is called the Shot Heard Round the World - shades into the grim news that the Soviet Union has just tested an atomic bomb. The baseball itself, fought over and scuffed, generates the narrative that follows. It takes the reader deeply into the lives of Nick and Klara and into modern memory and the soul of American culture - from Bronx tenements to grand ballrooms to a B-52 bombing raid over Vietnam. A generation's master spirits come and go. Lenny Bruce cracking desperate jokes, Mick Jagger with his devil strut, J. Edgar Hoover in a sexy leather mask. And flashing in the margins of ordinary life are the curiously connected materials of the culture. Condoms, bombs, Chevy Bel Airs, and miracle sites on the Web. Underworld is a story of men and women together and apart, seen in deep clear detail and in stadium-sized panoramas, shadowed throughout by the overarching conflict of the Cold War.

Library Journal

In DeLillo's newest...luminaries gathered in a box at the New York Polo Grounds to watch the Dodgers and the Giants battle it out for the pennant receive word that the Russians are testing an atomic bomb. DeLillo then flashes forward through a half-century of the Cold War as seen through the eyes of two protagonists briefly united by their passionate affair. BOMC and Quality Paperback Book Club main selections.

Author : Don DeLillo

Publisher : Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group

Published Year : July 1998

Edition : First Edition

Format : Paperback - Paperback, 832 pages

Subject : Fiction, American Fiction, World Literature, Fiction Subjects, Peoples & Cultures - Fiction

Dimensions : 5.30 (w) x 7.90 (h) x 1.80 (d)

ISBN : 0684848155

ISBN13 : 9780684848150

Overview :

'DeLillo’s most affecting novel yet...A dazzling, phosphorescent work of art.'-Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

'The clearest vision yet of what it felt like to live through that day.' -Malcolm Jones, Newsweek

'A metaphysical ghost story about a woman alone…intimate, spare, exquisite.' -Adam Begley, The New York Times Book Review

'A brilliant new novel....Don DeLillo continues to think about the modern world in language and images as quizzically beautiful as any writer.' - San Francisco Chronicle

Don DeLillo was awarded the 1999 Jerusalem Prize for a writer whose work expresses the theme of freedom of the individual in society.