Title: End Zone
Author: Don DeLillo
Cover artist: photo
Yours for: $8
- Way outside my normal collection timeframe, but the cover (and author) caught my eye—seemed memorable / remarkable—like the last thing you see before you get strangled (to death, presumably).
- I like that it's a novel about football, but the cover only barely suggests this (title, font, "New Gladiators").
- That's the opposite of "Fear Hand"—most mid-century covers have a victim POV, with woman reacting to some kind of impending attack. Here, the attacker (in a context that can be only dimly imagined).
Best things about this back cover:
- Dang, high praise for a novel I've never heard of.
- "Is God a Football Fan?" is a pretty good tagline.
- So much for your Nostradamian powers, Cincinnati Enquirer.
Page 123~
"Gary Harkness. Good name. Promotable. I like it. I even love it."If anyone ever says "Relax and call me Wally," you're gonna want to end the conversation quickly and get out of there.
"Thanks."
"Relax and call me Wally."
"Right," I said.
~RP
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Tumblr]
2 comments:
Inquirer or Enquirer: does English change on the border of Ohio and PA?
I read this one a few years ago during a DeLillo kick (so to speak). Yes, it's about football, but also ties into fears of imminent nuclear war. As I recall it was DeLillo's second novel and he was trying for too many things at once. All I recall is the novel ends with some sort of game -- poker or chess, can't recall -- between the narrator and some straight-backed former military type. I also recall the narrator's hippie-chick girlfriend, who opens his right-wing mind to the "new sensibilities."
DeLillo's early material is weird and fun. It's too bad his short stories have never been collected. I got a bunch of them years ago via Interlibrary Loan, all of them photocopied by various lending libraries from the original magazines. One of them, titled "The Uniforms," was pretty great, about a group of hippie terrorists going around and just killing everyone. It was later collected in the 1973 book "Cutting Edges." You can read more here: http://perival.com/delillo/dduniforms.html
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