The angel Esmeralda : nine stories

 by Don DeLillo After 15 reverberating novels, DeLillo, winner of the National Book Award and the PEN/Saul Bellow Prize, to name but two of his honors, assembles his first short story collection. In tales dating from 1979 to 2011, DeLillo is prescient and timeless, commanding and sensitive. A recurring motif involves individuals ensnared in mysterious dialectics. Two students at an isolated college become obsessed with a stranger. Two men orbit the earth in Human Moments in World War III. gazing down at a planet besieged by desertification, violent storms, and war. A man in a prison for white-collar felons watches his young daughters on television delivering edgy stock-market reports in a brilliantly topsy-turvy take on global financial crises. An elegant tale about an earthquake raises urgent questions about how one lives gracefully on shifting ground. The title story is a masterpiece. Set in the graffiti-covered ruins of the South Bronx, it tells the wrenching tale of two nuns, a feral girl, a murder, and the profound hunger for a miracle. In each trenchant tale, DeLillo shows us that we are made of stories and that our quest for anchorage in safe harbors is a grand illusion. This towering collection builds in the mind like a mighty cumulonimbus lit by lightning flashes and scored with thunder. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: A signal writer, DeLillo always makes news, and this prophetic first will be of unique interest. --Booklist (Check catalog)