Jon Carroll Lists Powers Novel in his Ten Best Column!

Jon Carroll is a wonderful columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, and he occasionally drops in a mention of Powers into his writing. This year, in his "10 Best" column, he places "The Time of Our Singing" as the "best thing in the past decade." His comment: "You can thank me later."

Thanks, Jon!

New Powers Novel--Scooped!

Edward Champion's "Reluctant Habits" blog features the news that Farrar, Straus, and Giroux have listed an upcoming Powers novel for October 2009 release, with the title Generosity: An Enhancement.

Facebook Fan Page for Powers

A couple of days ago, I launched a Facebook page for Richard Powers fans. Please stop by and sign on, and start a discussion!

Update as of February 24, 2009: The original page was incorrectly set up to make it look like Powers himself was posting and reading. I've corrected that, but unfortunately, if you signed up for the first page, I had to delete you. Please visit the new page via the link from the title of this post and sign on again! My apologies, and many thanks. --editor

Obama and Powers

A fun blog post on Nick's Cafe Canadien comparing Time of Our Singing with Obama's candidacy:

I thought of a book on Tuesday night: the Richard Powers novel The Time of Our Singing, published in 2003. In a roundabout way, it is about Barack Obama.

Nick, in turn, points to an interview with Douglas Hofstadter, author of Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Band, in which he draws a similar line:

One last thing — I think we have to slowly stop talking about people as “black” and “white” as if this were a black-and-white (no pun intended) distinction. Barack Obama is a perfect example. Why is he any more black than he is white? It’s just a convention. When you see him in that photo sitting between his mother’s parents when he was a student at Columbia, you can see that he has as much whiteness in him as he has blackness. The “venerable” old tradition, or convention, of labeling a person “black” if they have even the slightest trace of African “blood” in them is an absurdity that comes straight out of slavery, and we should just drop it. Why is Tiger Woods called “black” rather than “Thai”? We have a lot of collective growing-up to do in our society in this regard. A very powerful book I read in which this idea was a central theme was Richard Powers’ novel “The Time of Our Singing”.

Ninth Letter's Powers Videos Available

All five Ninth Letter video interpretations of Powers's work are available on their webiste. Thanks to Ninth Letter editor Jodee Stanley for getting in touch to let me know.

1. Issue 10: Time of Our Singing
2. Issue 16: Plowing the Dark
3. Issue 18: The Echo Maker
4. Issue 21: The Gold Bug Variations
5. Issue 24: Galatea 2.2

I'll get these listed in the formal bibliography soon.

Literaire Lente 2007 -- Richard Powers

A video in Dutch, and with beautiful, poetic animation, about The Echo Maker." Includes video of Powers, and of cranes. Posted on YouTube in April 2007.

Richard Powers on YouTube: Ninth Letter piece

A lyrical video piece by Ninth Letter, with Powers reading from Time of Our Singing. From Ninth Letter's posting on YouTube about the video:

To celebrate both Powers' literary accomplishments and his contributions to the University of Illinois, the Provost's Office commissioned production of five short video works, each of which interprets a passage from one of Richard Powers' novels -- The Goldbug Variations, Galatea 2.2, Plowing the Dark, The Time of our Singing, and The Echo Maker. The videos are a collaborative endeavor between Powers and a group of artists and designers from the School of Art + Design.

Over the next several months ninthletter.com will publish all five video works. This interpretation based on The Time of Our Singing is the first installment.

Powers publishes article in GQ on Genome Sequencing

Powers has an article in the current issue of GQ Magazine on his experience of having his genome sequenced, at the magazine's expense, this past summer.

Here's another blog post on Powers's article, in Mark Athitakis’ American Fiction Notes.

And, adding this on November 3: Looks like Powers has had the piece published in The Guardian as well: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/nov/01/human-genome-sequencing-richard-powers.

University of Illinois Event with WS Merwin, Robert Pinsky, and Richard Powers

Merwin, Pinsky & Powers: CultureTalk.

Powers to Moderate Talk

This free event will be held on Tuesday, October 28, at 7:30 p.m. at the University of Illinois, Urbana campus. Sounds great!

From the University of Illinois calendar website:

This event brings influential cultural figures to campus to discuss the evolving relationships between the arts and contemporary society.

Dante's masterpiece The Divine Comedy provides the basis for a conversation that coincides with the major academic conference "Translating the Middle Ages," sponsored by the UIUC Program in Medieval Studies and the Center for Translation Studies.

W.S. Merwin, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and essayist, has published over a dozen books of poetry, including The Carrier of Ladders and The River Sound, that have evolved from a medieval formality (echoed in his translation of Dante's Purgatorio) into a more distinctly American voice.

Translator, essayist, teacher, jazz musician, and three-term U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky founded the Favorite Poem Project, an online video database of ordinary people reading their most-cherished poems, and created the anthology Americans' Favorite Poems, now in its 18th printing. He earned the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in poetry and the Howard Morton Landon Translation Award for his translation of Dante's The Inferno.

Richard Powers, National Book Award winner, Pulitzer Prize finalist, Time Magazine Book of the Year honoree, UIUC Swanlund Chair in English, and author of the landmark novel The Gold Bug Variations, will moderate this expedition into the center of Dante's epic poem and its impact on literature, poetic structure, and the depiction of spirituality.

Powers Mentioned as Possible Future Nobel Laureate

The controversy stirred up by the recent comments by Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, in a story carried by the Associated Press, wound up putting Richard Powers's name into the spotlight as a frequently-mentioned potential future winner of the literature prize.

In a story by Scott McLemee in Inside Higher Ed, Levi Stahl of the University of Chicago Press was quoted:

"What writers might be on the verge of a Nobel-level career? I’m placing my bet on Richard Powers (as did the MacArthur Foundation several years ago): His oeuvre to this point has shown him to possess a restless, inquisitive mind that is unlikely to allow him to repeat himself or settle into a rut, while his ambitious attempts to marry the language and insights of science to psychological realism seems like a reasonable formula for the sort of sweeping masterpiece that could get the Nobel committee’s attention."

Richard Powers in the News

This blog will cover mentions of Richard Powers and his work in various media, falling outside the scope of the bibliography I maintain at www.richardpowers.net.