The 1980s was a decade of massive social, political and cultural change. 

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Reading lists

Books that shaped the 1980s

Libra

'Think of two parallel lines. One is the life of Lee H. Oswald. One is the conspiracy to kill the President. What bridges the space between them? What makes a connection inevitable? There is a third line. It comes out of dreams, visions, intuitions, prayers, out of the deepest levels of the self.' 
 
A troubled adolescent endlessly riding New York's subway cars, Lee Harvey Oswald enters adulthood believing himself to be an agent of history. This makes him fair game to a pair of discontented CIA operatives convinced that a failed attempt on the life of the US president will force the nation to tackle the threat of communism head on. 
 
Libra is a gripping, masterful blend of fact and fiction, laying bare the wounded American psyche and the dark events that still torment it. 
 
'An audacious blend of fiction and fact' The Times

An unparalleled trip into the heart of America

Even with all the swirling contradictory data, this you feel is America, and the news starts here

Monumental, DeLillo at his chilling best. Concentrates on the inner life of the people who shaped the Kennedy assassination. He constructs the very human faces behind a monstrous event, creating fiction which trespasses on reality

Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas. Friday, November 22, 1963. 12.30 PM. 
 
Shots ring out. A president dies. And a nation is plunged into psychosis. 
 
Don DeLillo's extraordinary Libra is a brilliant reimagining of the events and people surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Concentrating on the lives of Lee Harvey Oswald, some rogue former spooks unhappy with Kennedy's presidency, and Nicholas Branch, a CIA archivist, trying to make sense of or draw inferences from the mass of information after the assassination, Libra presents an unapologeticly provocative picture of America in the second half of the last century.

Americana

A writer who, once you read him, makes you want to read everything he has done

DeLillo's swift, ironic, and witty cross-country nightmare doesn't have a dull or unoriginal line

Nearly every sentence rings true. DeLillo is a man of frightening perception

Witty, clever and incisive. Marvellously realised

Don DeLillo was born and raised in New York City. He has written fifteen novels and three stage plays and has won many honours including the National Book Award for White Noise, the International Fiction Prize for Libra, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for Mao II, the Jerusalem Prize, the Howells Medal for Underworld and the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction.

David Bell embodies the American dream. He's twenty-eight, has survived office coups, scandals, and beaten lesser rivals, to become an extremely successful TV exec. The images that flicker across America's screens, the fantasies that enthrall viewers, they are of his making. 
 
But David's dream is turning sour, nightmarish. He wants reality, to touch, feel and record what is real. He takes a camera and journeys across America in a mad, roving quest to discover and capture some sense of his own and his country's past, present and future. 
 
Americana is Don DeLillo's brilliant first novel.

An unparalleled work of historical conjecture, ranging imaginatively over huge tracts of the American popular consciousness, Don DeLillo's Libra contains an introduction by the author in Penguin Modern Classics. 
 
In this powerful, eerily convincing fictional speculation on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Don DeLillo chronicles Lee Harvey Oswald's odyssey from troubled teenager to a man of precarious stability who imagines himself an agent of history. When "history" presents itself in the form of two disgruntled CIA operatives who decide that an unsuccessful attempt on the life of JFK will galvanize the nation against Communism, the scales are irrevocably tipped. 
 
Don DeLillo (b.1936) was born and raised in New York City. Americana (1971), his first novel, announced the arrival of a major literary talent, and the novels that followed confirmed his reputation as one of the most distinctive and compelling voices in late-twentieth-century American fiction. DeLillo's comic gifts come to the fore in White Noise (1985), which won the National Book Award, Underworld (1997), hailed by Martin Amis as 'the ascension of a great writer', Cosmopolis (2003), adapted into a film by David Cronenberg, due to be released later this year, and Falling Man (2007), a novel about the aftereffects of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York. 
 
If you enjoyed Libra, you might like DeLillo's Americana, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 
 
'Don DeLillo's apocalyptic imagination takes on the assassination of John F. Kennedy... Breathtaking' 
Newsday

The author of thirteen novels, five plays, and numerous short stories, Don DeLillo was born in 1936. Americana (1971), his first novel, announced the arrival of a major literary talent, and the novels that followed confirmed his reputation as one of the most distinctive and compelling voices in late-twentieth-century American fiction. DeLillo's comic gifts come to the fore in White Noise (1985), which won the National Book Award, and Underworld (1997), with its vivid portraits of actor Jackie Gleason and standup comedian Lenny Bruce.

In this powerful, eerily convincing fictional speculation on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Don DeLillo chronicles Lee Harvey Oswald's odyssey from troubled teenager to a man of precarious stability who imagines himself an agent of history. When "history" presents itself in the form of two disgruntled CIA operatives who decide that an unsuccessful attempt on the life of the president will galvanize the nation against communism, the scales are irrevocably tipped.

'He's a writer who, once you read him, makes you want to read everything he's done' Martin Amis, Sunday Times

His first novel, Don DeLillo's Americana passionately articulates the neurotic landscape of contemporary American life through a disintegrating embodiment of the American dream. 
 
Prosperous, good-looking and empty inside, 28-year-old advertising executive David Bell appears on the surface to have everything. But he is a man on the brink of losing his sanity. Trapped in a Manhattan office with soulless sycophants as his only company, he makes an abrupt decision to leave New York for America's mid-west. His plan: to film the small-town lives of ordinary people and make contact with the true heart of his homeland. But as Bell puts his films together in his hotel room, he grows increasingly convinced that there is no heart to find. Modern America has become a land that has reached the end of its reel... 
 
Don DeLillo (b.1936) was born and raised in New York City. Americana (1971), his first novel, announced the arrival of a major literary talent, and the novels that followed confirmed his reputation as one of the most distinctive and compelling voices in late-twentieth-century American fiction. DeLillo's comic gifts come to the fore in White Noise (1985), which won the National Book Award, Underworld (1997), hailed by Martin Amis as 'the ascension of a great writer', Cosmopolis (2003), adapted into a film by David Cronenberg, due to be released later this year, and Falling Man (2007), a novel about the aftereffects of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York. 
 
If you enjoyed Americana, you might like DeLillo's Libra, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 
 
'He's a writer who, once you read him, makes you want to read everything he's done' 
Martin Amis, Sunday Times 
 
'Witty, clever and incisive ... a marvellously realized plot' 
Time Out 
 
'Nearly every sentence of Americana rings true ... DeLillo is a man of frightening perception' 
Joyce Carol Oates

Prosperous, good-looking and empty inside, 28-year-old advertising executive David Bell appears on the surface to have everything. But he is a man on the brink of losing his sanity. Trapped in a Manhattan office with soulless sycophants as his only company, he makes an abrupt decision to leave New York for America's mid-west. His plan: to film the small-town lives of ordinary people and make contact with the true heart of his homeland. But as Bell puts his films together in his hotel room, he grows increasingly convinced that there is no heart to find. Modern America has become a land that has reached the end of its reel...

Cleo Birdwell

Don DeLillo

Outrageously funny, erotic and vivid in its unforgettable characters and skewed wisdom. It’s also a kind of talisman against a thousand-thousand pointless, moribund celebrity memoirs; a pitch-perfect satire that somehow also remains joyous and uncynical. My mind and spirit feels cleansed by it.

I don’t know what to tell you except that Don DeLillo has written a horny hockey novel and – while he may not wish to publish it under his own name – nothing can diminish the pleasure of this magnificently funny, strange and joyful book

Joe Dunthorne, bestselling author of SUBMARINE and CHILDREN OF RADIUM

Rachel Kushner, Booker-shortlisted author of CREATION LAKE

Written with bone-dry wit, pitch-perfect dialogue and edgy social satire... The novel is studded with absurd, madcap moments, but it also sneaks in social satire thatin retrospect looks, as DeLillo’s work often does, prescient

By featuring a woman in a hypermasculine environment, the novel revels in opportunities to explore gender roles and lust as comic themes

Light on its and feet and lethally funny... If you’re a careful reader of DeLillo's work, his wit is absolutely delicious, and he can do a comic scene that will have you rolling on the floor, and that’s an aspect of his worldview that he let off the leash for AMAZONS

A funny, racy hockey novel DeLillo published under a pen name, be reprinted for the first time in 46 years... a faux memoir written from the perspective of the first woman to play in the NHL, full of jokes, weird asides and social satire, and a fair amount of sex. There’s hockey too, of course.

Closest thing we have to a great American hockey novel

The biggest re-release of the year... This is full-tilt DeLillo in a comedic picaresque mode, reveling in a woman’s perspective on the follies great and small of men and society. Fizzing with shrewd commentary with a stand-up comedy vibe, wily absurdity, and vividly rendered characters, Amazons scores.

An Intimate Memoir by the First Woman Ever to Play in the National Hockey League

Cleo Birdwell is twenty-four, a schoolteacher’s daughter from Badger, Ohio, and the first ever female recruit to play in the National Hockey League. She is an instant sensation on and off the ice - lauded not only for her mettle on the rink, but also for her honey blonde hair, her milky blue eyes, her style and her stamina. And as she spends her first season travelling across North America, she can’t help but stumble into her own adventures of sex, fun, and scandal. 
 
A cult treasure, re-issued for the first time in fifty years, Don DeLillo’s pseudonymous masterpiece offers a gloriously funny skewering of the absurdity of the male gaze, the commodification of sport, the booming culture of 70s America – and of one young woman determined to make her way on her own terms.

Don DeLillo

Books by Don DeLillo

Articles featuring Don DeLillo

Books that shaped the 1980s

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