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    The Silence
    The Silence
    The Silence
    Audiobook1 hour

    The Silence

    Written by Don DeLillo

    Narrated by Laurie Anderson, Jeremy Bobb, Marin Ireland and

    2.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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

    Editor's Note

    Eerie and prescient…

    Don DeLillo (“White Noise,” “Underworld”) finished “The Silence” just weeks before the Covid-19 outbreak, which makes this novella all the more eerie and prescient. Friends gather for dinner in New York City on Super Bowl Sunday when suddenly, mysteriously all digital connections are cut, trapping the group in a tech blackout while the world as they know it seems to crumble around them.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateOct 20, 2020
    ISBN9781797117614
    The Silence
    Author

    Don DeLillo

    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. 

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    Reviews for The Silence

    2.5/5

    105 ratings4 reviews

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    • 1/5
      He’s an excellent writer, but you wouldn’t know it from this. Please read White Noise or Underworld instead.

      3 people found this helpful

    • 1/5
      What a waste of time. Wow. One hour of my life I’ll never get back.
    • 5/5
      Very atmospheric, secretive, contemporary. You can’t help but feel you’re in the presence of great art. This is not your usual work of fiction, just like Zero K is not. This is a different standard of fiction, subtle and elegant.
    • 3/5
      I don’t know.. This book just did not do it for me. I suppose this was like an episode of Seinfeld – A lot of story about nothing in particular.