"It's my nature to keep quiet about most things. Even the ideas in my work. When you try to unravel something you've written, you belittle it in a way. It was created as a mystery, in part."
--Don DeLillo, from the 1979 interview with Tom LeClair
There are a number of books and essays which are devoted to analysis of Don Delillo's writing. This page concentrates on the books only (for the most part), with most recent on top.
The best online bibliography of DeLillo literary criticism can be found at the Don DeLillo Society site: http://www.ksu.edu/english/nelp/delillo/biblio/litcrit.html.
Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction: Transatlantic Perspectives on Don DeLillo (2010)
Great to see the publication of this book of essays from the DeLillo Conference held in Osnabrück, Germany in 2008 (see my page on the Conference). Edited by conference organizers Peter Schneck and Philipp Schweighauser.
Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction is published by Continuum, ISBN-13: 9781441139931, 2010 (hardcover, 264 pages).
Contents include:
Introduction - Philipp Schweighauser and Peter Schneck
Memory Work after 9/11
The Wake of Terror: Don DeLillo's "In the Ruins of the Future," "Baader-Meinhof," and Falling Man - Linda S. Kauffman
Grieving and Memory in Don DeLillo's Falling Man - Silvia Caporale Bizzini
Collapsing Identities: The Representation and Imagination of the Terrorist in Falling Man - Sascha Pöhlmann
Writers, Terrorists, and the Masses
6,500 Weddings and 2,750 Funerals: Mao II, Falling Man, and the Mass Effect - Mikko Keskinen
Influence and Self-Representation: Don DeLillo's Artists and Terrorists in Postmodern Mass Society - Leif Grössinger
The Art of Terror--the Terror of Art: DeLillo's Still Life of 9/11, Giorgio Morandi, Gerhard Richter, and Performance Art - Julia Apitzsch
Don DeLillo and Johan Grimonprez
Grimonprez's Remix - Eben Wood
Dial T for Terror: Don DeLillo's Mao II