Amazons, original 1980 edition
This page lists the known reviews of Cleo Birdwell/Don DeLillo's 1980 novel (written with help from Sue Buck), Amazons.
New reviews coming in for the republication!
Bookforum (Fall 2026) ran "Ice Wide Shut" a nice long piece by Ed Park, with the killer first line: "She speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in her eye that’s halfway horny" - and here's a bit more:
But here is Amazons, in a slick new package, available once more: the return of the repressed. I propose that, far from being an outlier in DeLillo's twentieth-century canon, the novel is central to his work. You can take this literally. Amazons emerges two years after Running Dog, and two before The Names; if included in the official bibliography, then, it appears at the midpoint of his first and finest run of novels—number seven of twelve. It’s not just a titillating soufflé amid headier fare, a money grab, a bit of sleaze, though it also is those things.
The Atlantic (December, 2026) ran "Hockey Finally Has the Great Books It Deserves" by John Swansburg covers Amazons and The Intangibles by Nick Paumgarten. Not fully online, but here's a piece:
The on-ice action is overshadowed by ever more elaborate accounts of Birdwell's sexual adventures. In the course of one season, she sleeps with the Rangers' head coach, the Rangers' general manager, a former Rangers player, and one very jet-lagged tennis star. This is an incomplete list. In the brutal assessment of one critic in Calgary, Amazons is "little more than hardcover softcore porn that will disappoint hockey fans and heavy breathers alike."
(09-Nov-2026)
And now we learn that Amazons will be back in print!
The New York Times (Mar. 20, 2026) ran "Don DeLillo’s Ribald Hockey Romp Will Return to Stores" by Alexandra Alter. Apparently the decision was made quite informally, at least in part triggered by last month's story:
Then, this February, a few days after the Times article ran, DeLillo and his wife had lunch at their home with DeLillo's longtime editor, Nan Graham, and the novelist Dana Spiotta, and Amazons came up. DeLillo’s wife had stayed up until midnight the night before, reading it and laughing, Graham said....
Shortly after the lunch, Graham and Straus called DeLillo and urged him to consider reprinting the book.
“He said, what the hell, why not,” said Graham, who called Amazons a “comic masterpiece.”
The story includes a picture of the famous business card, which will appear on the epigraph page, but that will be the only appearance of DeLillo's name on the book.
(Mar 21, 2026)
In 2026, Amazons again catches some attention because of a recent TV show called “Heated Rivalry” featuring a hockey romance:
The New York Times (Jan. 27, 2026) ran "Did Don DeLillo Invent Hockey Erotica?" by Alexandra Alter, with background quotes from Jonathan Lethem and Gerald Howard. Note: Alter did an interview with DeLillo a while back.
For decades, DeLillo, who through his publisher declined to comment for this article, remained silent on the subject of Amazons. Five years ago, he tacitly acknowledged authorship during an interview with The New York Times Magazine. "Oh god. How do you remember that?" he said when asked about Amazons.Others, however, believe the novel deserves to be ranked among his funniest books, as well as his most erotic, a mode that DeLillo isn’t known for. The sex scenes in Amazons are frequent, explicit, elaborate and often very funny.
In bed with a former Rangers player, Birdwell describes how he "took the gum out of his mouth and stuck it on the wall near his head. For later, I guess."
Defector (March 4, 2026) ran "Don DeLillo’s Funniest Novel Is A 1980 Hockey Sex Romp He Won’t Acknowledge" by Pete Segall, with some musing on why he might have written it.
So: The guy from the Bronx has gone to Greece, ostensibly to work on The Names. He has documented the hollow anomie of the 1970s. He's about to square up with some true heavyweights: language and history themselves. Things are starting to feel severe. In such a situation, any writer might find himself feeling constrained. Weighed down. In need of an outlet to be unserious.
...
Despite a few melancholic moments spent ruminating on the existence of athletes as commodity fetishes, Amazons is an exercise in concentrated silliness. It's a writer, who happens to be one of the titans of his era, fucking around on paper, either to work things out or just because he thought it might be fun to do it. Even having it published was a prank. So what if it's his funniest book? (It is.) Some things you just have to do and then work at forgetting about them.
(Mar 4, 2026)
In recent years (2008-2014) here have been a number of articles "re-discovering" Amazons:
In Bookforum (Dec/Jan 2008) "The Puck Stopped Here" by Gerald Howard gives most of the facts. Howard edited several of DeLillo's books.
Amazons came into the world more in the style of a put-on than a hoax. DeLillo wrote the book in collaboration with Sue Buck, a friend and colleague from his Ogilvy & Mather days and a dedicatee of White Noise. She apparently provided such hockey expertise as was needed and the raw material concerning Cleo's idyllic Ohio childhood. DeLillo's editor at Knopf, his publisher at the time, was insufficiently amused, and so the two were allowed to sell the book elsewhere on the condition that DeLillo's authorship be hidden. Holt, Rinehart, and Winston picked Amazons up and proceeded to publish it with deadpan skill, slyly eliding the question of its factual nature.
Flavorwire offered "When Don DeLillo Switched Genders" by Jason Diamond (July 17, 2013).
The Weeklings then had "Amazons: Don DeLillo's Obscure 'Intimate Memoir'" by Victoria Patterson (Jan. 7, 2014).
Grantland followed with "A Tale of Two Dons: DeLillo's 'Forgotten Memoir' and Novello's Yearbook About Sheep by Tess Lynch (Jan. 13, 2014).
But Birdwell is not a professional author; her narrative follows no game plan. She experiences it as we do, moment by moment, and is sometimes equally surprised at the turns of events. Naturally, since she is a woman and full of small-town sociability, she writes mostly not about hockey action, in which every player is alone, or even about her happy youth. She tells about the people she lives among. And in the world of professional sport they are almost all men.New York Times: September 16, 1980 - review of Amazons by C. Lehmann-Haupt.
But even if it doesn't sound funny, it is. Cleo Birdwell has a way with the incongruous, which doesn't come as a surprise once you've learned that her name is the nom de plume for Don DeLillo, the novelist. She has this talent for grabbing clichés by the throat and strangling them until they cough up meaning. She turns meaning inside out and exposes its nonsense.