"One of the most intelligent grimly funny voices to comment on life in present-day America" (The New York Times) Don DeLillo presents an extraordinary new novel about words and images novelists and terrorists the mass mind and the arch-individualist. At the heart of the book is Bill Gray a famous reclusive writer who escapes the failed novel he has been working on for many years and enters the world of political violence a nightscape of Semtex explosives and hostages locked in basement rooms. Bill's dangerous passage leaves two people stranded: his brilliant fixated assistant Scott and the strange young woman who is Scott's lover—and Bill's.