NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • An “eerie, brilliant, and touching” (The New York Times) modern classic about mass culture and the numbing effects of technology. “Tremendously funny . . . A stunning performance from one of our most intelligent novelists.”—The New Republic
The inspiration for the award-winning major motion picture starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig Jack Gladney teaches Hitler Studies at a liberal arts college in Middle America where his colleagues include New York expatriates who want to immerse themselves in “American magic and dread.” Jack and his fourth wife, Babette, bound by their love, fear of death, and four ultramodern offspring, navigate the usual rocky passages of family life to the background babble of brand-name consumerism.
Then a lethal black chemical cloud floats over their lives, an “airborne toxic event” unleashed by an industrial accident. The menacing cloud is a more urgent and visible version of the “white noise” engulfing the Gladney family—radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, ultrasonic appliances, and TV murmurings—pulsing with life, yet suggesting something ominous.
Penguin Classics is the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world, representing 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.
Part of the Penguin Orange Collection, a limited-run series of twelve influential and beloved American classics in a bold series design offering a modern take on the iconic Penguin paperback
Winner of the 2016 AIGA + Design Observer 50 Books | 50 Covers competition
For the seventieth anniversary of Penguin Classics, the Penguin Orange Collection celebrates the heritage of Penguin's iconic book design with twelve influential American literary classics representing the breadth and diversity of the Penguin Classics library. These collectible editions are dressed in the iconic orange and white tri-band cover design, first created in 1935, while french flaps, high-quality paper, and striking cover illustrations provide the cutting-edge design treatment that is the signature of Penguin Classics Deluxe Editions today.
White Noise
Winner of the 1985 National Book Award, 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.
Praise for White Noise:Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction "One of the most ironic, intelligent, grimly funny voices to comment on life in present-day America . . . [
White Noise] poses inescapable questions with consummate skill."
—Jayne Anne Phillips, The New York Times Book Review"DeLillo's eighth novel should win him wide recognition as one of the best American noveslists. . . . the homey comedy of
White Noise invites us into a world we're glad to enter. Then the sinister buzz of implication makes the book unforgettably disturbing."
—Newsweek "A stunning book . . . it is a novel of hairline prophecy, showing a desolate and all-too-believable future in the evidence of an all-too-recognizable present. . . . Through tenderness, wit, and a powerful irony, DeLillo has made every aspect of
White Noise a moving picture of a disquiet we seem to share more and more."
—Los Angeles Times "
White Noise captures the quality of daily existence in media-saturated, hyper-capitalistic postmodern America so precisely, you don’t know whether to laugh or whimper."
—TIME"DeLillo is a prodigiously gifted writer. His cool but evocative prose is witty, biting, surprising, precise . . .
White Noise [is] arguably [his] best novel."
—The Washington Post "Its brilliance is dark and sheathed. And probing. In
White Noise, Don DeLillo takes a Geiger-counter reading of the American family, and comes up with ominous clicks."
—Vanity Fair"A stunning performance from one of our most intelligent novelists . . . Tremendously funny."
—The New Republic "DeLillo’s love and flair for language unite to tell us [...] something discomforting about mortality and something profound about the way we deal with it. It may be a novel superabounding with words, but none of them are wasted."
—The Guardian 
