Big Ideas Event:
Don Delillo Reading
Monday, September 24, 8pm. at the 92 St Y.

People will tell you that Delillo is the most important American novelist alive today. They'll say he's more subversive than the other grand old names on the list - Toni Morrison, Phillip Roth, John Updike - more alive to the reality of the present than Cormac McCarthy. They'll say he's a recluse, a paranoiac. They'll say, like Lorrie Moore, that "No one can match his ability to let America speak through his pen. No one’s prose is better than DeLillo’s."

Tonight, you can judge for yourself.

Tonight, he'll be reading from his new novel, Falling Man, which describes the aftermath of what happened on September 11th, 2001.

We'll be thinking about the relationship between historical calamity and art, between violence and poetry, between the terrorist and the novelist - and about these questions, posed in Lorrie Moore's review of Delillo's Mao II: "If terrorists have seized control of the world narrative, if they have captured the historical imagination, have they become, in effect, the world's new novelists? For sheer influence over the human mind, have they displaced a precariously placed literature?"

For a little more background, you can head to the bookstore the library. Or you can start with the New York Times Featured Author page for Delillo.