Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award From the author of
White Noise (winner of the National Book Award) and
The Silence, a profound novel about art, terror, masses, and the individual from "one of the most intelligent, grimly funny voices to comment on life in present-day America" (
The New York Times)
Bill Gray, a famous, reclusive novelist, emerges from his isolation when he becomes the key figure in an event staged to force the release of a poet hostage in Beirut. As Bill enters the world of political violence, a nightscape of Semtex explosives and hostages locked in basement rooms, Bill's dangerous passage leaves two people stranded: his brilliant, fixated assistant, Scott, and the strange young woman who is Scott's lover--and Bill's.
An extraordinary novel from Don DeLillo about words and images, novelists and terrorists, the mass mind and the arch-individualist,
Mao II explores a world in which the novelist's power to influence the inner life of a culture now belongs to bomb-makers and gunmen.
Mao II is the work of an ingenious writer at the height of his powers.