I've been a huge Don DeLillo fan for many, many years. I still think Underworld (Picador, 1997) is by some distance his best work, and have found the books since then slight, confusing and opaque, although still compellingly readable. It's interesting, given the brevity of his recent novels, that he has now chosen to publish his first book of short stories, although they are not all recently written. The stories arranged in the collection in chronological order, starting with 1979's Creation. Only the last three stories could be described as recent, dating from 2009, 2010, and 2011. I enjoyed these stories a great deal, more so than any of the recent novels, although they all have an oblique, dreamlike style. Their settings range from astronauts in orbit, to nun's struggling to help the desperate in a dystopian urban slum.These are unsettling and disturbing stories, with enough space that the reader is more unsettled by what is not on the page than by what is, which is often apparently banal. Apparently, a new novel is not far away. I'll be reading it.