Love-Lies-Bleeding - by Don Delillo (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Love-Lies-Bleeding, Don DeLillo's third play, is a daring, profoundly compassionate story about life, death, art and human connection.

Three people gather to determine the fate of the man who sits in a straight-backed chair saying nothing. He is Alex Macklin, who gave up easel painting to do land art in the southwestern desert, and he is seventy now, helpless in the wake of a second stroke. The people around him are the bearers of a complicated love, his son, his young wife, the older woman -- his wife of years past -- who feels the emotional tenacity of a love long-ended.

It is their question to answer. When does life end, and when should it end? In this remote setting, without seeking medical or legal guidance, they move unsteadily toward last things.

Luminous, spare, unnervingly comic and always deeply moving, Love-Lies-Bleeding explores a number of perilous questions about the value of life and how we measure it.

About the Author

Don DeLillo is the author of seventeen novels including Underworld, Zero K, Libra, and White Noise, and the story collection The Angel Esmeralda, a finalist for the Story Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He has also written plays and essays. He has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the PEN/Saul Bellow Award, the Jerusalem Prize for his complete body of work, the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and, in 2025, the Academy's Gold Medal for Fiction. DeLillo has been awarded the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction and the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.