Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime
and start saving today with fast, free delivery
Amazon Prime includes:
Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.
Amazon Prime members enjoy:- Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
- Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
- Streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows with limited ads on Prime Video.
- A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
- Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
- Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access
Important: Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.
Buy new:
$13.59$13.59
FREE delivery: Tuesday, April 23 on orders over $35.00 shipped by Amazon.
Ships from: Amazon.com Sold by: Amazon.com
Buy used: $9.95
Other Sellers on Amazon
+ $3.97 shipping
95% positive over last 12 months
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Libra (Contemporary American Fiction) Paperback – May 1, 1991
Purchase options and add-ons
In this powerful, unsettling novel, Don DeLillo chronicles Lee Harvey Oswald’s odyssey from troubled teenager to a man of precarious stability who imagines himself an agent of history. When “history” presents itself in the form of two disgruntled CIA operatives who decide that an unsuccessful attempt on the life of the president will galvanize the nation against communism, the scales are irrevocably tipped.
A gripping, masterful blend of fact and fiction, alive with meticulously portrayed characters both real and created, Libra is a grave, haunting, and brilliant examination of an event that has become an indelible part of the American psyche.
- Print length480 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPenguin Books
- Publication dateMay 1, 1991
- Grade level12 and up
- Reading age18 years and up
- Dimensions7.73 x 5.04 x 0.85 inches
- ISBN-109780140156041
- ISBN-13978-0140156041
"All the Little Raindrops: A Novel" by Mia Sheridan for $10.39
The chilling story of the abduction of two teenagers, their escape, and the dark secrets that, years later, bring them back to the scene of the crime. | Learn more
Frequently bought together

Similar items that may ship from close to you
From the Publisher
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Americana | End Zone | Great Jones Street | White Noise | Libra | Mao II | |
| More Titles by Don Delillo | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Editorial Reviews
Review
Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction
"[DeLillo's] richest novel . . . It's in commonplace moments that [he] reveals his genius . . . a triumph."
—Anne Tyler, The New York Times
"Much of DeLillo’s earlier fiction now seems a brilliant prelude to [this novel] . . . Libra displays his genius for creative paranoia: he fills the gaps in the record with his imagination, spinning a brilliant web out of a heap of improbable coincidences."
—London Review of Books
"[Libra] is like a stop-motion frame of the crossfire, a still picture of an awful moment . . . DeLillo's prose has a quality of demented lyricism."
—The New Yorker
"Extraordinary intensity . . . unforgiving thoroughness . . . DeLillo has created a thriller of the most profound sort . . . Libra is electrifying, a book alive with suggestion."
—Chicago Tribune
"Libra operates at a dizzyingly high level of intensity throughout; it's that true fictional rarity—a novel of admirable depth and relevance that's also a terrific page-turner."
—USA Today
From the Back Cover
Chicago Tribune
"Libra operates at a dizzyingly high level of intensity throughout; it s that true fictional rarity a novel of admirable depth and relevance that s also a terrific page-turner."
USA Today
"DeLillo s novel is like a stop-motion frame of the crossfire, a still picture of an awful moment.... [His] prose has a quality of demented lyricism."
The New Yorker
About the Author
In 1997, he published the bestselling Underworld, and in 1999 he was awarded the Jerusalem Prize, given to a writer whose work expresses the theme of the freedom of the individual in society; he was the first American author to receive it. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Product details
- ASIN : 0140156046
- Publisher : Penguin Books; Reissue edition (May 1, 1991)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 480 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780140156041
- ISBN-13 : 978-0140156041
- Reading age : 18 years and up
- Grade level : 12 and up
- Item Weight : 10.8 ounces
- Dimensions : 7.73 x 5.04 x 0.85 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #44,904 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #150 in Biographical Historical Fiction
- #256 in Biographical Fiction (Books)
- #3,759 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Don DeLillo is the author of fifteen novels, including Zero K, Underworld, Falling Man, White Noise, and Libra. He has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize for his complete body of work, and the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2010, he was awarded the PEN/Saul Bellow Prize. The Angel Esmeralda was a finalist for the 2011 Story Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In 2012, DeLillo received the Carl Sandburg Literary Award for his body of work.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonReviews with images
-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
I see now why Ellroy loves the book. DeLillo's take is very persuasive and executed with high art. DeLillo's Oswald is an alienated loner, seeking to connect with something important. He's not sure what that is--a momentous event, a large historical process? He distrusts all governments--ours, the USSR's, the Mexicans'--and moves mercurially between ideologies. He serves in the military; he defects to Russia; he leaves Russia; he flees his mother though she is the only steady point in his life; he marries a Russian woman but beats her and drives her away. As those who would seek to exploit him realize, he is both vague and weak but sometimes strong and determined. He has been bullied and brutalized in the past but he has somehow survived; he could be the perfect tool.
It is an old principle in literary study that the more you get to know a character the more you like that character, even if the character is radically flawed. DeLillo is working against that principle and he does so successfully. The more we get to know Oswald . . . the more we get to know him. We do not like him; we simply begin to understand him as a figure more pathetic than malevolent, more sad than savage, more lost and doomed than the other characters in the shadows who populate his world.
The other dark forces--Castro-hating CIA agents, bitter Mafiosi, uber-weird right-wingers like David Ferrie--are beautifully realized and ultimately part of the strange stew in which Lee Harvey Oswald ultimately finds himself. In capturing the characters DeLillo is capturing the times. He does that very well. He also captures the places, particularly New Orleans and Dallas, though we get a feel for Miami as well.
DeLillo's structure is largely chronological, but he switches between characters and points of view and offers an overall impression that coheres very nicely. Much of the character depiction is phenomenological, with a summation of experiences, impressions, insights, glimpses, momentary realizations. This is very Ellroyesque and we can see DeLillo's influence in many ways.
Finally, this is a piece of historical fiction which is very plausible, very moving and very, very sad. The writing is generally exquisite. The characters and events (as Conrad would say) have been very carefully contemplated. In Heart of Darkness Conrad writes of the `brooding gloom' that hangs over London and its environs. If it's brooding gloom that you want, here, in Libra, is God's plenty.
Highly recommended.
Top reviews from other countries
DeLillo narra di come, a volte il caso, a volte gli uomini, abbiamo favorito l' incrocio tra Lee, il capriccio della Storia, e JFK, il fascinoso presidente.
Il testo scorre su due piani paralleli che confluiscono nel magistrale finale. La storia, la causalità, il tempo, il destino impongono la congiunzione. C'è Lee, la sua infanzia, gli stenti,il rapporto stretto con la madre, le vessazioni, la dislessia, la rabbia, la voglia di riscatto, le letture marxiste, i Marines.E' strano, solitario, non integrato.Ha un sorriso beffardo.Lascia i Marines, entra in Russia, dove vive,controllato dal KGB, e lavora in fabbrica per due anni, sposa una russa, Marina, deluso dall' URSS, ritorna negli Stati Uniti. C' è la ricostruzione fittizia del complotto ad opera di agenti della CIA costretti ai margini, di cubani anticastristi, di ex-FBI. Pieni di rancore, traditi, scottati dalla disfatta della Baia dei Porci. Tra queste due flussi narrativi naviga Nicolas Branch che, venticinque anni dopo, è incaricato di preparare un dossier segreto sull' assassinio di JFK. Chiuso in una stanza, tra migliaia di documenti, reperti, fotografie,perizie balistiche,testimonianze.Una mole impressionante di dati nella quale è impossibile districarsi. C' è tutto e il contrario di tutto.
Libra.La Bilancia.Nel tentativo di rimanere in equilibrio tra le ombre, le contraddizioni, le coincidenze,la duplicità, DeLillo non tenta di fornire risposte certe, ma si assume pienamente l' enorme responsabilità di condurci in quei sette secondi che hanno cambiato l' America, lì nel vortice della Storia, perché “la Storia è la somma totale delle cose che non ci hanno raccontato”.








