The Angel Esmeralda, Don DeLillo
The Angel Esmeralda, Don DeLillo
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The Angel Esmeralda
Nine Stories

Author: Don DeLillo

Narrator: Michael Cerveris, Peter Friedman, Heather Lind, Mercedes Ruehl, Aaron Tveit

Unabridged: 6 hr 16 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 11/15/2011


Synopsis

A finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Story Prize, the first ever collection of “dazzlingly told” (The New York Times) short stories—now available as a trade paperback.

Set in Greece, the Caribbean, Manhattan, a white-collar prison and outer space, this “small masterpiece of short fiction” (USA Today) is a mesmerizing introduction to Don DeLillo’s iconic voice. In “Creation,” a couple at the end of a cruise somewhere in the West Indies can’t get off the island—flights canceled, unconfirmed reservations, a dysfunctional economy. In “Human Moments in World War III,” two men orbiting the earth, charged with gathering intelligence and reporting to Colorado Command, hear the voices of American radio, from a half century earlier. In the title story, Sisters Edgar and Grace, nuns working the violent streets of the South Bronx, confirm the neighborhood’s miracle, the apparition of a dead child, Esmeralda.

Nuns, astronauts, athletes, terrorists and travelers, the characters in The Angel Esmeralda propel themselves into the world and define it. These nine stories describe an extraordinary journey of one great writer whose prescience about world events and ear for American language changed the literary landscape.

About Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo is the author of seventeen novels including Underworld, Zero K, Libra, and White Noise, and the story collection The Angel Esmeralda, a finalist for the Story Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He has also written plays and essays. He has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the PEN/Saul Bellow Award, the Jerusalem Prize for his complete body of work, the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and, in 2025, the Academy's Gold Medal for Fiction. DeLillo has been awarded the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction and the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Violet on March 07, 2016

Angel Esmeralda – 1 Creation – A husband and wife are trapped on a remote island where all outgoing flights are cancelled. As ever Delillo’s prose is gloriously incisive and lyrical. And as usual he does a fabulous job of evoking in a new and searing light contemporary situations. In this story he’s......more

Goodreads review by Tim on June 25, 2022

Don DeLillo has a very distinctive writing style. It's like a wand he waves over the modern world and you see things you see every day with an added dimension. My favourite stories were two characters orbiting the earth in a space mission and the ministering of a grizzled old nun to an abandoned cas......more

Goodreads review by el on March 13, 2025

shoutout to don delillo. when i'm in the mood for what some call his "bloated" prose (prone to atmospheric detours during which he flexes his never-ending array of overly muscular verbs/adjectives to show us how untalented and poorly read we are), his work HITS. when i'm not in the mood for his pros......more

Goodreads review by Krok Zero on December 12, 2011

FUUUUUCK YEAAAAAAAH DeLillo, so closely identified with the novel, one of the artists whose insistence upon the novel as the preeminent form of human expression, or at least American expression, has allowed the novel to endure as such... this same DeLillo, this mad genius with the ever-loaded and ini......more

Goodreads review by Domenico Fina on November 02, 2019

"Le notizie esistono per scomparire, è quello lo scopo delle notizie, quale che sia la storia, ovunque succeda. Noi contiamo sul fatto che le notizie scompaiano, dice mio padre. Poi mio padre è diventato una notizia. Poi è scomparso. (Dal racconto "Falce e martello") Una raccolta di racconti sorpren......more