HeyJaredDon DeLillo Should Win the Nobel Prize
With episodes in which two devoted readers (Jeffrey Severs and Michael Streit) unpack his deadpan, hilarious, and disturbing works one by one, DDSWTNP is dedicated to the idea that Don DeLillo, the greatest of living writers, deserves every serious reader’s attention.
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 5
- Latest publication
- Sep 9, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 4, 2026
Latest episodes
Episode 41: Better Things for Better Living Through Chemistry with Mark Osteen (opens the original)
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In Episode 41 DDSWTNP continue the Summer of Underworld by turning attention to Part 5 and the conclusion of Manx Martin’s narrative and welcoming to the show Mark Osteen, major literary scholar, author of American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture (2000), and editor of the two Library of America volumes comprising DeLillo’s novels from 1982 to 1997. Mark is also an accomplished saxophonist with special insights into the inspiration DeLillo takes from jazz. We hear from Mark a
Episode 40: The Cloud of Unknowing and Cocksucker Blues with Patrick Whitmarsh (opens the original)
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In Episode 40 DDSWTNP cover Parts 3 and 4 and Manx Martin (2) of Underworld and welcome to the show Patrick Whitmarsh, a scholar of eco-criticism, the anthropocene, and the contemporary U.S. novel. We spend time discussing the importance of Underworld to Patrick’s arguments about perspective, scale, images of the earth, and the advent of what he calls the “vertical sciences,” taking in geological discoveries, aerial viewpoints, and all the new understandings of natural and built environments tha
Episode 39: Long Tall Sally and Elegy for Left Hand Alone with Curt Gardner (opens the original)
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In Episode 39 DDSWTNP look at Parts 1 and 2 of Underworld and welcome back to the show Curt Gardner, creator of the most important DeLillo resource in cyberspace, Don DeLillo’s America (https://perival.com/delillo/delillo.html). We talk with Curt about his indispensable site coming online thirty years ago, just as news of DeLillo’s big novel was breaking, and at the episode’s end we get Curt’s thoughts on the emergent Internet of the mid-1990s as space for literary discussion and as this novel’s
Episode 38: Pafko at the Wall with John Duvall (opens the original)
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In Episode 38, DDSWTNP talk to John Duvall, a major scholar of DeLillo, author of a 2002 reader’s guide to Underworld, and expert especially on how DeLillo’s 1992 novella “Pafko at the Wall” became, five years later, the Prologue, “The Triumph of Death.” In examining the 1951 Giants/Dodgers game and the Soviets’ bomb test, we discuss with Duvall in great detail the issues of race and racism in the portrayal of fourteen-year-old Cotter Martin, winner of the struggle for Bobby Thomson’s home run b
Episode 37: Uncovering Underworld (opens the original)
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In Episode 37, DDSWTNP kick off the Summer of Underworld with an overview that, like Episode 20: Discovering White Noise, offers newcomers to the novel a set of things to look out for as well as readings bound to appeal to those already familiar with DeLillo’s big book and headed back to it. How is this mega-novel structured in its six main Parts bookended by Prologue and Epilogue? How and why does it portray time’s variability and crisscross four decades of history? What to make of all the depi
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