Richard Powers photos on Fiickr

Richard Powers
Originally uploaded by Miami Book Fair International

The Miami Book Fair has posted a number of pictures of Powers's recent appearance. Take a look!

Another piece on Powers's Miami appearance

From the "Of Mild Interest" blog, a very fun piece on Powers's reading and talk at the Miami Book Fair.

As another added bonus, the icing on the cake to the evening, which would already have affirmed near-hero-status of Powers for me (though chronologically, this happened at the opening of the Q&A portion): Powers doesn't sign his books. And rather than just saying that he doesn't sign books, he actually explained why. His reasons happened to line up rather precisely with reasons I've maintained for years for not getting books signed by authors, so that as he finished his explanation (dealing with the themes of his first book as well as how we construct meaning and use-value, and how that pertains to what kind of aura-of-specialness an author's signature gives to a book), saying "...how we find meaning in the age of mechanical reproduction," and trailing off a bit. I was compelled to applaud, which really doesn't happen to me very often. My two friends joined in a bit, and a couple other folks in the hall, but mostly people just looked over, wondering who the hell was clapping. But Powers looked too, so that was great.

Powers in Miami

Nice piece about Powers's appearance at the Miami Book Fair.

The book fair faithful - retirees toting their yellow "Friends of the Fair'' bags and college kids in ripped jeans and baseball caps and all sorts of people in between - listened intently as the bespectacled Powers read a dazzling scene from Generosity‚ in which dissenting factions square off on an Oprah-esque talk show. He didn't grab the microphone like a rock star (or like Barbara Kingsolver did a few nights ago), but his
quietly sturdy reading brought the passage to life, and even drew laughs.

Bob Hoover at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Pokes at Wood

This is a delightful piece by Post-Gazette writer Bob Hoover, in which he wonders, with no small degree of sarcasm, whether he shouldn't perhaps re-evaluate his positive views of Powers's writing given the attack by James Wood in the New Yorker on the author's latest work, and indeed, on his entire body of work.

Where had we all gone wrong, I wondered. How valuable would it be for the critics and their readers to re-evaluate "Generosity" in light of Wood's criticism, because he is the "greatest literary critic"?

Powers Featured in WSJ Along with 9 Others

Take a look at the Wall Street Journal's article, "How To Write a Great Novel".

"Richard Powers, whose books are often concept-driven, intricately plotted and stuffed with arcane science, wrote his last three novels while lying in bed, speaking to a lap-top computer with voice-recognition software.

"To write "Generosity," his recent novel about the search for a happiness gene, he worked like this for eight or nine hours a day. He uses a stylus pen to edit on a touch screen, rewriting sentences and highlighting words.

" "It's recovering storytelling by voice and recovering the use of the hand and all that tactile immediacy," Mr. Powers says of the process. "I like to use different parts of my brain." "

Fascinating Look at Language Use in a Powers Interview

Wow--this blogger (Language Log) listened to the Studio360 interview (see yesterday's posts) and deconstructed it to place where Powers uses falls or rises within the context of his speech patterns and the context of the substance of what he is saying. Fascinating--not sure I'd want to be examined at quite that level of detail, myself.

Studio360.org Clip of Powers Reading from Generosity

To go with their interview with Powers, the folks at Studio360.org have also posted a clip of Powers reading from Generosity. See below: