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  • Cosmopolis

  • Written by: Don DeLillo
  • Narrated by: Will Patton
  • Length: 5 hrs and 22 mins
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars (4 ratings)

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Cosmopolis

Written by: Don DeLillo
Narrated by: Will Patton
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Publisher's Summary

It is an April day in the year 2000 and an era is about to end, those booming times of market optimism when the culture boiled with money and corporations seemed more vital and influential than governments.

Eric Packer, a billionaire asset manager at age 28, emerges from his penthouse triplex and settles into his lavishly customized white stretch limousine. On this day he is a man with two missions: to pursue a cataclysmic bet against the yen and to get a haircut across town.

His journey to the barbershop is a contemporary odyssey, funny and fast-moving. Stalled in traffic by a presidential motorcade, a music idol's funeral, and a violent political demonstration, Eric receives a string of visitors - his experts on security, technology, currency, finance, and theory. Sometimes he leaves the car for sexual encounters and sometimes he doesn't have to.

Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo's 13th novel, is both intimate and global, a vivid and moving account of a spectacular downfall.

©2003 Don DeLillo (P)2003 Simon & Schuster, Inc. AUDIOWORKS is an imprint of Simon & Schuster Audio Division, Simon & Schuster, Inc.

What the critics say

"DeLillo, master novelist and seer, tells the surreal, electrifying story of this dehumanized moneyman in English scrubbed so clean and assembled so exquisitely it seems like a new language....Breathtakingly poetic and devastatingly witty." ( Booklist)
Cosmopolis is nothing if not challenging, thought-provoking, and utterly different.” ( Chicago Sun-Times)
Cosmopolis is written with the sort of intensity you simply don't get elsewhere.” ( GQ,UK)

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Poignantly Prophetic.

Largely unappreciated at the time of its publication, Don Dilello's hypnotic and dizzying treatise on technology, economics and mortality has gained a startling new relevance. The novel presents us with the story of Eric Packer, a jaded and cynical billionaire grown old before his time who embarks on a strange and beguiling urban odyssey in his futuristic linousine on a particularly hectic day in NYC with the seemingly trivial goal of getting a haircut from a very specific barber. Along the way we are privy to Packer's interactions with his wife, employees, bodyguards and lovers as he boldly mixes business with pleasure and engages in a protracted financial and professional suicide, all while being hounded by anti-capitalist protesters , pie-throwing agitators and a mysterious assassin. Packer may seem like a vague and fanciful character to some but in today's world of crypto, NFTs and rampant idealization of self-made men he is frighteningly plausible and realistic, as are many of his bizarre misadventures and interactions with the people around him. The story is hilarious, disturbing and poignant in equal measure and exemplifies Dilello's deft mastery as one of the greatest and most forward thinking American authors of his time. The audiobook is also very well produced, with underrated character actor Will Patton delivering a spirited yet dryly ironic narration that suits the tone of the narrative very well. Highly recommended.

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