Underworld

DeLillo opens at the 1951 Giants-Dodgers pennant game and follows the home-run ball through fifty years of American life: waste management, the arms race, graffiti artists, Lenny Bruce, the Bronx. It runs to more than eight hundred pages and moves backwards through time. The prologue, published separately as Pafko at the Wall, is among the most admired set pieces in recent American fiction.