LIVE from the NYPL: The Angel Esmeralda: DON DELILLO in conversation with JONATHAN FRANZEN

October 24, 2012

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For a generation of younger novelists, Don DeLillo has been the defining voice, the writer whose sentences have inspired and influenced their own. On the library's stage, DeLillo will read from his collection of short stories, The Angel Esmeralda, a finalist for the Story Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Writer Jonathan Franzen will then join him on stage to discuss DeLillo’s work and the influence it has had on Franzen’s own writing.

Set in Greece, the Caribbean, Manhattan, a white-collar prison, and outer space, the nine stories in The Angel Esmeralda are a mesmerizing introduction to Don DeLillo’s iconic voice, from the rich, startling, jazz-infused rhythms of his early work to the spare, distilled, monastic language of the later stories. The characters in The Angel Esmeralda—nuns, astronauts, athletes, terrorists, and travelers—propel themselves into the world and define it. Written between 1979 and 2011, these stories chronicle—and foretell—three decades of American life.

DON DELILLO is the author of fifteen novels, including Falling Man, Point Omega, Libra, and White Noise, and three plays. He has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and the Jerusalem Prize.
 
JONATHAN FRANZEN is the author of four novels—The Twenty-Seventh City, Strong Motion, The Corrections, and Freedom—as well as two collections of essays, How to Be Alone and Farther Away and a memoir, The Discomfort Zone.  Franzen lives in New York City and Boulder Creek, California.