Episode 35: "Creation"
From Don DeLillo Should Win the Nobel Prize by Jeffrey Severs & Michael Streit
April 26, 2026 · 1h 24m · Episode 35
About this episode
The episode explores Don DeLillo's short story 'Creation' and its themes of Romanticism, infidelity, and the American tourist experience.
Anticipating a summer to be spent exploring Underworld, DDSWTNP in Episode 35 take a small detour to a DeLillo short story, “Creation,” which distills DeLillo’s omnipresent motifs of Romanticism and Christian mythos, transports literal and figurative, and disillusionment with the maintenance of Edenic experience — perhaps especially for the American tourist trying to escape from, rather than into, their vacation world. This 1979 story of infidelity, manipulation, and fantasy depicts repeated journeys to a small, jammed Caribbean airport that draw thoughts about godliness, meaning, and mortal fear from an unnamed narrator who has the impulse to write but perhaps not the skills and honed perception. In “Creation” we find many unexpected things: stirring parallels to the space orbits of “Human Moments in World War III”; a precursor to the voice of James Axton to emerge amid Mediterranean islands three years later; and of course new turns on the key DeLillo topos of plane travel and the contingencies of leaving the earth for the sky. Elements of journeys in Americana, Mao II, Cosmopolis, and Valparaiso come up, and we conclude that Rupert the cab driver may be the hero of this tale…
People in this episode
Hosts: Jeffrey Severs, Michael Streit
Topics covered
- DeLillo's motifs
- Romanticism
- Christian mythos
- infidelity
- American tourism
- literary analysis
- short stories
Keywords
- Don DeLillo
- Creation
- Underworld
- short story
- literary themes
- American tourism
- infidelity
- Christian mythos
- Romanticism
Mentioned in this episode
Books & works: Underworld, Creation, Human Moments in World War III, Americana, Mao II, Cosmopolis, Valparaiso, The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories, Where Do We Come From? What Are We
More episodes of Don DeLillo Should Win the Nobel Prize
- Episode 36: Ratnerama · June 7, 2026 · 2h 15m
- 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
- Episode 30: "So What?" · October 16, 2025 · 1h 15m
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