Underworld: A Novel - Couverture souple

"There's pleasure on evey page of this pitch-perfect evocation of a half-century." (Malcolm Jones Newsweek)

"Underworld is a page-turner and a masterwork, a sublime novel and a delight to read." (Joan Mellen The Baltimore Sun)

"Masterpieces teach you how to read them, and Underworld is no exception....Anastonishing piece of prose and a benchmark of twentieth-century fiction, Underworld is stunnigly beautiful in its generous humanity, locating the true power of history not in tyranny, collective political movements of history books, but inside each of us." (Greg Burkman The Seattle Times)

Underworld is a “dazzling and prescient novel...A decade after 9/11, it’s worth rereading Don DeLillo’s 1997 masterpiece to appreciate how uncannily the author not only captured the surreal weirdness of life in the second half of the 20th century but also anticipated America’s lurch into the terror and exigencies of the new millennium...A breathtaking set piece...the prologue is a bravura display of Mr. DeLillo's literary powers." (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times)

"Underworld is magnificent book by an American master." (Salman Rushdie)

"The book is an aria and a wolf-whistle of our half century. It contains multitudes." (Michael Ondaatje)

“His best novel and perhaps that most elusive of creatures, a great American novel . . . . a masterpiece in which the depth and reach of the commonplace are invested with universal scope and grandeur. Underworld is also a thrilling page-turner, propelling us along with realistic characters and those compelling details that make it impossible for them—or us—to escape the past.” (David Wiegand, The San Francisco Chronicle Book Review)

“In Underworld, we have a mature and hugely accomplished novelist firing on all cylinders, at the sophisticated height of his multifarious powers. Reading the book is a charged and thrilling aesthetic experience and one remembers gratefully that this is what the novel can do, and indeed does, better than any other art form—it gets the human condition, it skewers and fixes it in all its richness and squalor unlike anything else. The novel is the ‘great book of life’ and as long as there are human beings who are readers it will survive and, with a little luck,even flourish. Don DeLillo’s Underworld is a formidably potent and hugely encouraging testimonial to this undeniable,indomitable and strangely consoling fact.” (William Boyd, London Observer)

“The most personal and contemplative of DeLillo’s novels . . . Underworld confirms that contemporary American fiction’s most promising movement involves novels on a large social and historical scale that stretch the norms of narrative and language.” (Vince Passaro, Harper’s)

“Underworld surges with magisterial confidence through time and through space.” (Martin Amis, The New York Times Book Review)

A finalist for the National Book Award, Don DeLillo’s most powerful and riveting novel—“a great American novel, a masterpiece, a thrilling page-turner” ( San Francisco Chronicle)— Underworld is about the second half of the twentieth century in America and about two people, an artist and an executive, whose lives intertwine in New York in the fifties and again in the nineties.

With cameo appearances by Lenny Bruce, J. Edgar Hoover, Bobby Thompson, Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason and Toots Shor, “this is DeLillo’s most affecting novel…a dazzling, phosphorescent work of art” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times).