Pafko at the Wall: A Novella

Written by Don DeLillo

Narrated by Billy Crudup, Zachary Levi and Tony Shalhoub

"There's a long drive.
It's gonna be.
I believe.
The Giants win the pennant.
The Giants win the pennant.
The Giants win the pennant.
The Giants win the pennant."
-- Russ Hodges, October 3, 1951
On the fiftieth anniversary of "The Shot Heard Round the World," Don DeLillo reassembles in fiction the larger-than-life characters who on October 3, 1951, witnessed Bobby Thomson's pennant-winning home run in the bottom of the ninth inning. Jackie Gleason is razzing Toots Shor in Leo Durocher's box seats; J. Edgar Hoover, basking in Sinatra's celebrity, is about to be told that the Russians have tested an atomic bomb; and Russ Hodges, raw-throated and excitable, announces the game -- the Giants and the Dodgers at the Polo Grounds in New York. DeLillo's transcendent account of one of the iconic events of the twentieth century is a masterpiece of American sportswriting.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
• Release date: Mar 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781797129365

Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo is the author of seventeen novels including White Noise, which was made into a Netflix film, Libra, Underworld, Falling Man, and Zero K. He has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the PEN/Saul Bellow Award, the Jerusalem Prize for his complete body of work, and the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His story collection The Angel Esmeralda was a finalist for the Story Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In 2013, DeLillo was awarded the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, and in 2015, the National Book Foundation awarded DeLillo its Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. 

Reviews for Pafko at the Wall

[Paul Himmelman · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

No one has ever made baseball so interesting. Things like this make me question whether or not I should watch sports until I remember that the game is infused with meaning by the author (at least in this case) and I can’t write like DeLillo even in my head.

[Jimmy M · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Simply put, this is great, terrific, haunting, beautiful. The loss of something, perhaps.