End Zone - Softcover

Don DeLillo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0671493027 ISBN 13: 9780671493028

Publisher: Pocket, 1983

Synopsis

Book by Don DeLillo

About this title

Review:

Don DeLillo's second novel, a sort of Dr. Strangelove meets North Dallas Forty, solidified his place in the American literary landscape in the early 1970s. The story of an angst-ridden, war-obsessed running back for Logos College in West Texas, End Zone is a heady and hilarious conflation of Cold War existentialism and the parodied parallelism of battlefield/sports rhetoric. When not arguing nuclear endgame strategy with his professor, Major Staley, narrator Gary Harkness joins a brilliant and unlikely bunch of overmuscled gladiators on the field and in the dormitory. In characteristic fashion, DeLillo deliberately undermines the football-is-combat cliché by having one of his characters explain: "I reject the notion of football as warfare. Warfare is warfare. We don't need substitutes because we've got the real thing." What remains is an insightful examination of language in an alien, postmodern world, where a football player's ultimate triumph is his need to play the game.

About the Author:

Don DeLillo is the author of two plays and thirteen novels, including Underworld and The Body Artist. He has won the National Book Award, the Jerusalem Prize and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize.

About this edition

• Publisher: Pocket
• Publication date: 1983
• ISBN 10: 0671493027
• ISBN 13: 9780671493028
• Binding: Paperback