Episode 28: Librarama
From Don DeLillo Should Win the Nobel Prize by Jeffrey Severs & Michael Streit
August 7, 2025 · 2h 30m · Episode 28
About this episode
The episode explores themes from Don DeLillo's novel 'Libra' and insights from Anthony DeCurtis's interview with DeLillo.
We’re still not done with Libra – or Libra is not done with us! In Episode 28, DDSWTNP pick up threads left hanging after our three-part treatment of DeLillo’s JFK novel. While tackling a wide variety of subjects, this episode homes in on Anthony DeCurtis’s 1988 interview with DeLillo for Rolling Stone (and later re-published in expanded form), “An Outsider in This Society.” We’re led to discuss DeLillo’s canny interview articulations in general, his method of writing by day and reading more history by night, and his reply to the suggestion that on the basis of Libra some readers regarded him as “a member of the paranoid left”: “I don’t have a program.” Along the way we also draw in vivid evidence of how DeLillo subtly reworked the voice of Marguerite Oswald from testimony in the Warren Report, what fellow Oswald novelist Norman Mailer had to say about Libra, and all that is illuminated by an exchange of letters to the New York Times between DeLillo and one of the Warren Report investigators. We also try here to understand as fully as possible the nuances of DeLillo’s ideas about historical fiction that emerge in the incredible DeCurtis interview: what DeLillo means when he says…
People in this episode
Hosts: Jeffrey Severs, Michael Streit
Topics covered
- DeLillo's interview
- historical fiction
- Libra analysis
- paranoia in literature
- writing process
- DeCurtis interview insights
Keywords
- Don DeLillo
- Libra
- Anthony DeCurtis
- historical fiction
- JFK
- interview
- paranoia
- writing process
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Rolling Stone, New York Times
Books & works: Libra, JFK, Warren Report
More episodes of Don DeLillo Should Win the Nobel Prize
- Episode 36: Ratnerama · June 7, 2026 · 2h 15m
- Episode 35: "Creation" · April 26, 2026 · 1h 24m
- Episode 34: An Interview with Tom LeClair · March 11, 2026 · 1h 48m
- Episode 33: Mao II · February 2, 2026 · 2h 60m
- Episode 32: Thomas Pynchon's Shadow Ticket · December 12, 2025 · 2h 42m
- Episode 31: An Interview with Gerald Howard · November 20, 2025 · 1h 13m
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