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The Silence by Don DeLillo
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The Silence

$15.74

Get for $14.99 with membership
Length 1 hour 52 minutes
Language English
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From the National Book Award–winning author of Underworld, a “daring…provocative…exquisite” (The Washington Post) novel about five people gathered together in a Manhattan apartment, in the midst of a catastrophic event.

It is Super Bowl Sunday in the year 2022. Five people, dinner, an apartment on the east side of Manhattan. The retired physics professor and her husband and her former student waiting for the couple who will join them from what becomes a dramatic flight from Paris. The conversation ranges from a survey telescope in North-central Chile to a favorite brand of bourbon to Einstein’s 1912 Manuscript on the Special Theory of Relativity.

Then something happens and the digital connections that have transformed our lives are severed.

What follows is a “brilliant and astonishing…masterpiece” (Chicago Tribune) about what makes us human. Don DeLillo completed this novel just weeks before the advent of the Covid pandemic. His language, the dazzle of his sentences offer a kind of solace in our bewildering world. “DeLillo’s shrewd, darkly comic observations about the extravagance and alienation of contemporary life can still slice like a scalpel” (Entertainment Weekly).

“In this wry and cutting meditation on collective loss, a rupture severs us, suddenly, from everything we’ve come to rely on. The Silence seems to absorb DeLillo’s entire body of work and sand it into stone or crystal.” —Rachel Kushner

Don DeLillo is the author of seventeen novels including White Noise, which was made into a Netflix film, Libra, Underworld, Falling Man, and Zero K. He has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the PEN/Saul Bellow Award, the Jerusalem Prize for his complete body of work, and the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His story collection The Angel Esmeralda was a finalist for the Story Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In 2013, DeLillo was awarded the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, and in 2015, the National Book Foundation awarded DeLillo its Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. 

Laura “Laurie” Anderson is an American avant-garde artist, composer, musician, and film director whose work spans performance art, pop music, and multimedia projects. She is a graduate of Barnard College and Columbia University, where she obtained an MFA in sculpture. Anderson started dating Reed in 1992, and was married to him from 2008 until his death in 2013.

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Reviews

"A full cast propels DeLillo's latest audiobook, which portrays our current relationship with technology. At a time in the close future, an unexplained technology disruption occurs, impacting the characters of this work at various levels. An international flight to New York crash-lands; the survivors are treated in a clinic that is also affected by the blackout. The Super Bowl broadcast goes dark, forcing neighbors to interact. DeLillo reflects on the nature of humanity, and who we've become. Marin Ireland's centering narrative anchors the stellar performances. Memorable characters include a gruff sports gambler who is reduced to watching a blank screen, portrayed by Jay O. Sanders, and a couple who survive the crash and are left to observe the aftermath, portrayed by Jeremy Bobb and Robin Miles. The collective performances make this story resonate more deeply." Expand reviews
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