The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories

Description

In The Angel Esmeralda, DeLillo finds the freedom to represent the wide range of human experience in contemporary America - and forces us to confront the uncomfortable shadows lurking in the background. His characters are exposed to their own deep, often unconscious, longings: one man exploits the vulnerability of a woman he's just met, following her home to her apartment and pushing her too far; another finds himself deceiving his wife and beginning an affair. They are subjected to shocking violations, unexpected acts of terror: a woman lives in constant fear of the earthquakes happening all around her; people bear witness to the mysterious abduction of a child from a small park by a stranger.

Don DeLillo, the author of fifteen novels, including Point Omega, Falling Man, White Noise and Libra, has won many honours in America and abroad, including the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize for his complete body of work and the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his novel Underworld. In 2010, he received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award. He has also written three plays.

Don DeLillo's richly compressed short stories are the work of a true master . . . In these stories or lucid dreams - sometimes drily shocking or mournfully funny, always masterfully designed - DeLillo himself isolates that stray thought, and makes of it great art. * Guardian *