Don DeLillo's New Novel 'Zero K' Publishing in May 2016

Don DeLillo’s longtime publisher Scribner will release his new novel Zero K on May 3, 2016. A simultaneous audio edition will be published by Simon & Schuster Audio.

The publication of Zero K follows DeLillo’s acceptance of the National Book Foundation’s 2015 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters which will be presented at its annual National Book Awards Ceremony and Benefit Dinner on November 18. One of the literary world’s most prestigious honors, the award recognizes “individuals who have made an exceptional impact on this country’s literary heritage” and will be presented by Pulitzer Prize-winning and fellow Scribner author Jennifer Egan.

Zero K follows billionaire Ross Lockhart whose younger wife Artis Martineau has a terminal illness. Ross is a significant investor in a secretive, remote compound where death is controlled and bodies are preserved until medical advances can restore individuals to improved lives. Lockhart hopes Artis can benefit from this pioneering science. “We are born without choosing to be. Should we have to die in the same manner? Isn’t it a human glory to refuse to accept a certain fate?” Told from the (continued)  perspective of Ross’s son Jeffrey Lockhart, Zero K weighs the devastations of our time against “the mingled astonishments of our lives, here, on earth.” It is Don DeLillo’s most powerful novel since the 1997 Underworld.

DeLillo is the author of fifteen novels, including Underworld, Falling Man, White Noise, and Libra. Among his many honors, he has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Library of Congress’s Prize for American Fiction, and the Carl Sandburg Literary Award.