Don DeLillo wrote 1980 erotic hockey novel 'Amazons' under a pen name

Don DeLillo secretly published an erotic hockey novel titled "Amazons" in 1980 under the pseudonym Cleo Birdwell, the New York Times reported on Jan. 27, 2026. The book is presented as a memoir by Cleo Birdwell, a fictional first woman in the National Hockey League, and contains frequent, explicit sex scenes alongside social satire.

The novel includes a character, the sportswriter Murray Jay Siskind, who later appears in DeLillo’s novel "White Noise." It was published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston with a phony author photo; the first printing of 20,000 copies sold out, but the book later fell out of print and remaining copies can sell for hundreds of dollars, the article says.

The Times says DeLillo released the book under the pen name and later distanced himself from it, omitting "Amazons" from his official bibliography and trying to have it expunged. Gerald Howard, a retired editor who worked with DeLillo, told the paper that DeLillo collaborated on the manuscript with Sue Buck and that Robert Gottlieb told DeLillo he could publish it elsewhere under a pen name.

DeLillo tacitly acknowledged authorship in a New York Times Magazine interview five years ago, and his publisher declined to comment for the article. Readers and writers quoted in the piece framed "Amazons" as an outsize comic outing in DeLillo’s oeuvre.

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