White Noise

The National Book Award–winning classic by the author of Underworld and Libra, featuring an introduction by Richard Powers, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Overstory and Playground

Now a major motion picture starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig

White Noise tells the story of Jack Gladney, his fourth wife, Babette, and four ultra­modern offspring as they navigate the rocky passages of family life to the background babble of brand-name consumerism. When an industrial accident unleashes an “airborne toxic event,” a lethal black chemical cloud floats over their lives. The menacing cloud is a more urgent and visible version of the “white noise” engulfing the Gladneys—radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, ultrasonic appliances, and TV murmurings—pulsing with life, yet suggesting something ominous.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Author Biography

Don DeLillo published his first short story when he was twenty-three years old. He has since written more than a dozen novels, including White Noise (1985), which won the National Book Award. It was followed by Libra (1988), his novel about the assassination of President Kennedy, and by Mao II, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In 1997 he published the bestselling Underworld, and in 1999 he was awarded the Jerusalem Prize, given to a writer whose work expresses the theme of the freedom of the individual in society; he was the first American author to receive it. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Richard Powers (introduction) is the author of more than a dozen novels, including the Pulitzer Prize winner The Overstory and the National Book Award winner The Echo Maker. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, he lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.