Don DeLillo will release his next novel this fall, and the timing is downright eerie.
Scribner will publish DeLillo’s The Silence in October. The publisher describes the book as “a novel about five people gathered in a Manhattan apartment on Super Bowl Sunday 2022, when an unknown catastrophic event renders the digital world silent.”
The publisher acknowledges that the book contains “echoes of the sudden, isolating effects of the Coronavirus.”
“I began writing the novel in 2018, long before the current pandemic,” DeLillo said in a news release. “I started with a vision of empty streets in Manhattan. The idea of the silence grew from sentence to sentence, from one chapter to the next.”
Nan Graham, Scribner’s publisher and DeLillo’s editor, said the author finished the novel just weeks before the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S.
“In The Silence, Don DeLillo conjures a catastrophe with uncanny parallels to this moment,” Graham said. “We need his language and his humanity now more than ever.”
DeLillo is one of America’s most celebrated novelists. He won the National Book Award for his 1984 novel White Noise, and his books Underworld and Mao II were both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. His most recent novel, Zero K, was published in 2016.
The Silence is slated for publication on Oct. 20.
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
