Rating: 4.5/5 
Strictly speaking, he hasn’t. The stories in this collection were written at various points throughout his career, with the earliest (the hauntingly if uncharacteristically sparse “Creation”) dating back to 1979. The nine short pieces in this book prove that, far from being a dilettantish dabbler in short fiction, DeLillo has made the form his own: the best of these stories do things novels couldn’t do, while staying focused on typically DeLillean themes and obsessions. Amazingly, he has been one of our best short story writers all along.
“Human Moments in World War III,” a highlight from 1983 (written between DeLillo’s great novels The Names and White Noise), finds the author flirting with science fiction for the first and only time. The story concerns a pair of astronauts orbiting the earth on a defense mission for some future war, and the genre-crossing allows DeLillo to register some of his most brilliant observations on technology, violence and consciousness. The story’s concluding description of an astronaut gazing out the window into space qualifies as one of DeLillo’s very finest moments.
Of the more recent stories, “Hammer and Sickle,” from 2010, is the clear standout. Displaying a rare awareness of contemporary culture — even DeLillo’s 9/11-themed novel Falling Man felt, paradoxically, as though he could have composed it in some previous decade — this story deals with the current world economic crisis, following white-collar criminal inmates of a minimum-security facility. The snippets of narration about smartphones and modern tech hint, tantalizingly, at what a DeLillo novel about the way we live now might look like, but the meat of the story — about a TV news program in which small children report the latest developments in the financial meltdown —harkens back to classic DeLillo dissections of media while commenting on the present situation. This tension between old themes and a new world produces one of the great achievements of DeLillo’s late career.
Other stories here are less masterful, but offer plenty to chew on. “The Ivory Acrobat” shows how much DeLillo can do with the barest of plot materials; its narrative can be summarized as, “a woman living in Greece freaks out after a deadly earthquake hits her region.” That’s all that happens, but out of this threadbare scenario DeLillo spins one stunning sentence after another, perfectly capturing the magnification of unease, dislocation, fear and paranoia when you’re a long way from home and scary things are going on. “Midnight in Dostoevsky,” about a couple of college students who create elaborate mythologies for professors and townies, asks whether it’s preferable to know with certainty or to invent in darkness. And the last story in the collection, “The Starveling,” is a melancholy ode to the solitary New York cinephiles who spend their days hopping from one film screening to another.
There’s not a dud in the bunch, and if the book’s brevity reinforces DeLillo’s preference for the longform — he has barely written enough stories for this collection to be publishable — it also offers irrefutable proof of the great author’s dexterity. If his readers are lucky, it won’t be another four decades before another assemblage of his short fiction sees the light of day.
