The Names

By Don DeLillo

Risk analyst James Axton lives in Athens and works across Greece and the Middle East, part of a community of American ex-pats that includes his estranged wife and child. Their peripatetic existence is interrupted when a horrific, unexplained murder on the island of Kouros becomes the catalyst for Axton becoming embroiled in a dizzying conspiracy of ritualistic violence, cultism, and ancient languages. Evocative, complex and beguiling, The Names is another major work from one of the 20th century’s great prose stylists.

Part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the best of modern literature.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan
• Release date: Aug 19, 2011
• ISBN: 9781447207214

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 The Names

[nog_5 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This one got a little bit too self-consciously artistic for me.

[nohablo · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Like looking into the face of God. What can you possibly say? How the hell do you describe the pieces? Describe the fit? It's a weird alchemy. Delillo's prose is (as always) weirdly flat-footed and purposefully awkward, but somehow, he cuts it in a way that's searing and prophetic and Old Testament and just gorgeous in its steady, matter-of-fact pacing. Reading THE NAMES is like reading the original template for the world. It's the Rosetta Stone for, y'know, civilization as we know it, NBD. Delillo has this insane, skull-pounding virtuoso talent for distilling into a single, effortless throw-away parenthetical observation a topic that's amassed an electron cloud of buzzing contradictory arguments and thoughts and pages and articles and column inches. And that talent is humbling and catastrophic and you turn the last page and it feels like a privilege. A grand unearned privilege to sit and bask in the interrogation-lamp brilliance of this book and watch Delillo just peel away skein after skein of, well, what DOESN'T this book cover? Of every layer of human interaction: love, affairs, children, terrorism, tourism, money, murder, marriage, death. All of it. Just atomized and scrutinized then blown away. For you. Jesus Christ, this was good good good.

[torbenjohnsen · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It has been a long time since I read this book so perhaps I shouldn't review it, but the negative review posted gave me pause and I felt like including a bit of a counterbalance. A very uncomfortable, foreboding, experience which I can still relive some 15 or so years later. An exploration into magical thinking which is at the core of all religions and most pathologies. Like going through survival training. Glad I did it but wouldn't necessarily want to repeat it. I would suggest trying "White Noise" for an equally profound but less difficult read.