around them." Mao II was placed in the second tier ("Recommended") in a 2007 New York guide to DeLillo's oeuvre, where the novel was described as "DeLillo at his most aphoristic [...] Less a novel than a series of crowd-scene set pieces linked by a reclusive novelist’s attempt to free a poet hostage, it contains his most extended thoughts on the relationship between fiction and terrorism." In 2011, Martin Amis listed Mao II among his favorite novels in DeLillo’s output. In a 2016 retrospective write-up for Granta, Colin Barrett lauded Mao II as a "mordantly funny, casually prescient, hypnotically condensed novel about art, about terror [...] short, loosely plotted but simultaneously tight as a drum". Jeff Somers ranked it sixth among 17 DeLillo books, arguing that "it doesn’t have much of a plot and can be perceived as DeLillo disappearing into himself—but when you’re as strong a writer as DeLillo, you can get away with that. Its seemingly prophetic vision of terrorist acts to come (it was published in 1991) grant the book gravitas". References External links New York Times review A Lecture on Mao II by Tom LeClair DeLillo’s Mao II by Mike Dell’Aquila, Construction Magazine (May 22, 2012) 1991 American novels Novels by Don DeLillo Postmodern novels Novels about terrorism Novels about writers Charles Scribner's Sons books PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction-winning works