White Noise

Front Cover
Penguin, 1999 - Fiction - 310 pages
A brilliant satire of mass culture and the numbing effects of technology, White Noise tells the story of Jack Gladney, a teacher of Hitler studies at a liberal arts college in Middle America. Jack and his fourth wife, Babette, bound by their love, fear of death, and four ultramodern offspring, navigate the rocky passages of family life to the background babble of brand-name consumerism. Then a lethal black chemical cloud, unleashed by an industrial accident, floats over there lives, an "airborne toxic event" that is a more urgent and visible version of the white noise engulfing the Gladneys—the radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, and TV murmurings that constitute the music of American magic and dread.
 

Contents

Section 1
3
Section 2
5
Section 3
9
Section 4
14
Section 5
18
Section 6
22
Section 7
27
Section 8
31
Section 18
98
Section 19
159
Section 20
165
Section 21
170
Section 22
175
Section 23
181
Section 24
194
Section 25
202

Section 9
35
Section 10
54
Section 11
59
Section 12
61
Section 13
70
Section 14
75
Section 15
80
Section 16
85
Section 17
94
Section 26
226
Section 27
245
Section 28
251
Section 29
269
Section 30
282
Section 31
290
Section 32
306
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About the author (1999)

Don DeLillo published his first short story when he was twenty-three years old. He has since written twelve novels, including White Noise (1985) which won the National Book Award. It was followed by Libra (1988), his novel about the assassination of President Kennedy, and by Mao II, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

In 1997, he published the bestselling Underworld, and in 1999 he was awarded the Jerusalem Prize, given to a writer whose work expresses the theme of the freedom of the individual in society; he was the first American author to receive it. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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