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  • Published: 19 November 2026
  • ISBN: 9781405997027
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 400
Categories:

Amazons

An Intimate Memoir by the First Woman Ever to Play in the National Hockey League




A wickedly funny satire of sex and sport in 1970s America from one of the most beloved writers of the 20th century

Cleo Birdwell is twenty-four, a schoolteacher’s daughter from Badger, Ohio, and the first ever female recruit to play in the National Hockey League. She is an instant sensation on and off the ice - lauded not only for her mettle on the rink, but also for her honey blonde hair, her milky blue eyes, her style and her stamina. And as she spends her first season travelling across North America, she can’t help but stumble into her own adventures of sex, fun, and scandal.

A cult treasure, re-issued for the first time in fifty years, Don DeLillo’s pseudonymous masterpiece offers a gloriously funny skewering of the absurdity of the male gaze, the commodification of sport, the booming culture of 70s America – and of one young woman determined to make her way on her own terms.

  • Published: 19 November 2026
  • ISBN: 9781405997027
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 400
Categories:

About the authors

Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo has written seventeen novels, including White Noise, which won the National Book Award. It was followed by Libra, his bestselling novel about the assassination of President Kennedy; Mao II, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction; and the bestselling Underworld, which in 2000 won the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for the most distinguished work of fiction published in the prior five years. In 1999, DeLillo was awarded the Jerusalem Prize, given to a writer whose work expresses the theme of freedom of the individual in society. His other books include the novels Cosmopolis, Falling Man, and Point Omega and the story collection The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories. He has also written occasional essays and three stage plays. In 2010 DeLillo became the third author to receive the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. He was awarded the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction in 2013.

Praise for Amazons

Outrageously funny, erotic and vivid in its unforgettable characters and skewed wisdom. It’s also a kind of talisman against a thousand-thousand pointless, moribund celebrity memoirs; a pitch-perfect satire that somehow also remains joyous and uncynical. My mind and spirit feels cleansed by it.

Luke Kennard, Booker-longlisted author of BLACK BAG

A funny, racy hockey novel DeLillo published under a pen name, be reprinted for the first time in 46 years... a faux memoir written from the perspective of the first woman to play in the NHL, full of jokes, weird asides and social satire, and a fair amount of sex. There’s hockey too, of course.

Literary Hub

By featuring a woman in a hypermasculine environment, the novel revels in opportunities to explore gender roles and lust as comic themes

The Times

Closest thing we have to a great American hockey novel

Keith Gessen

I don’t know what to tell you except that Don DeLillo has written a horny hockey novel and – while he may not wish to publish it under his own name – nothing can diminish the pleasure of this magnificently funny, strange and joyful book

Joe Dunthorne, bestselling author of SUBMARINE and CHILDREN OF RADIUM

I don't want to talk about it

Don DeLillo, epigraph to AMAZONS

Light on its and feet and lethally funny... If you’re a careful reader of DeLillo's work, his wit is absolutely delicious, and he can do a comic scene that will have you rolling on the floor, and that’s an aspect of his worldview that he let off the leash for AMAZONS

Bookforum

The biggest re-release of the year... This is full-tilt DeLillo in a comedic picaresque mode, reveling in a woman’s perspective on the follies great and small of men and society. Fizzing with shrewd commentary with a stand-up comedy vibe, wily absurdity, and vividly rendered characters, Amazons scores.

Booklist

The funniest book I've ever read

Rachel Kushner, Booker-shortlisted author of CREATION LAKE

Written with bone-dry wit, pitch-perfect dialogue and edgy social satire... The novel is studded with absurd, madcap moments, but it also sneaks in social satire thatin retrospect looks, as DeLillo’s work often does, prescient

New York Times