‘The Angel Esmeralda’ - Don DeLillo’s first ever collection of short fiction

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI - New York Times - Published: November 16, 2011

“The Angel Esmeralda,” the title story in Don DeLillo’s first ever collection of short fiction, is a dazzlingly told tale of despair and ruination, the dream of redemption and the testing of faith. Set in the Bronx and featuring a nun on the lookout for a miracle, this 1994 story prefigures portions of Mr. DeLillo’s 1997 masterwork, “Underworld,” but it also stands on its own as a beautifully realized and singular work of fiction.

Photo by Joyce Ravid -Don DeLillo

THE ANGEL ESMERALDA - Nine Stories

By Don DeLillo

Illustrated. 213 pages. Scribner. $24.

This tale not only uses all of Mr. DeLillo’s electric gifts of language but also is one of his rare, deeply emotional forays into the human heart, giving us two nuns — the aging, crotchety Sister Edgar, and her younger, practical-minded colleague, Sister Grace — who work the mean streets of the Bronx, delivering food to the “hardest cases in the projects”: the elderly diabetic with an amputated leg, the two blind women who lived together and shared a seeing-eye dog, a woman in a wheelchair who would probably trade the groceries for heroin, the “five small children bunched on a bed being minded by a 10-year old.”     

Full review at The New York Times