Ransom Center Magazine

Don DeLillo

IN FLIGHT: Don DeLillo’s The Silence

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by HENRY VEGGIAN
As hard as it may be to do, try to ignore the warning. That’s what I tell myself, but it’s still there, on the inside flap of the dust jacket. It has the tone of a press release, but it sounds more like the car horn you hear before the crash. “Don DeLillo completed this novel just weeks before the advent of COVID-19.”

My first reaction was an eye roll. Here we go again, I thought, the old story about DeLillo the prophet/artist who foresaw 9-11, who foresaw the Great Recession, who gives us a language in advance of the event. My Italian brain plucked a phrase from another life —“la vecchia lagna”—the boring old complaint. [Read more…] about IN FLIGHT: Don DeLillo’s The Silence

ABOUT HENRY VEGGIAN
Henry Veggian teaches in the Department of English at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Understanding Don DeLillo (2014).

Archive of Michael Ondaatje, author of “The English Patient,” acquired

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The archive of award-winning author Michael Ondaatje has been acquired by the Harry Ransom Center. Ondaatje, author of the Booker Prize-winning novel “The English Patient,” is widely regarded as one of the finest English-language novelists writing today. [Read more…] about Archive of Michael Ondaatje, author of “The English Patient,” acquired

Fellows Find: Revelations hidden on post-its, in book flaps, and in the margins of the papers in David Foster Wallace’s archive

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Stephen J. Burn, a Reader in American Literature after 1945 at the University of Glasgow, visited the Ransom Center during the spring of 2011 to research his book-in-progress, Neurofiction: the Contemporary American Novel and the Brain (Don DeLillo/ David Foster Wallace). Burn’s research was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Research Fellowship Endowment.

 

When I first visited the Harry Ransom Center in August of 2008, I wasn’t looking for David Foster Wallace. I’d just finished revising a book that read Wallace alongside his contemporaries Jonathan Franzen and Richard Powers (Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism), and was putting together a blueprint for a new book that I planned to build out of the Center’s archive of Don DeLillo’s assorted drafts and research materials. [Read more…] about Fellows Find: Revelations hidden on post-its, in book flaps, and in the margins of the papers in David Foster Wallace’s archive

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