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A fun picture on Flickr of the French translation of The Time of Our Singing.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Monday, September 28, 2009
Bloggers weigh in on Generosity
As I find them, I'll add extended comments and reviews, positive and negative, from the blogosphere to the list below. Quite a conversation developing here, with familiar themes as to the varied takes on Powers's abilities as a novelist. You can check on in-print reviews on the main Powers Generosity reviews page at richardpowers.net, which frequently includes hotlinks to the reviews themselves.
Book Sherpa
Brainiac responds eloquently to Peter D. Kramer's Slate review.
The Complete Review
Conversational Reading: "James Wood's Richard Powers Takedown."
Ed Champion's Reluctant Habits entry, also looking at the Wood review, but from a differing perspective: "Needless to say, as I anticipated, Wood has again demonstrated his predictably vanilla failings with idea-driven novels. He is once again hysterical, starving and naked in a sad but interesting way, about a novel that is not always intended to be explicitly realist."
The 941
Ted Gioia on BC Books
Anne Trubek on the Good.is blog. Takes apart a specific aspect of the James Wood argument, regarding Powers's use of speech-recognition software.
Paul LeFarge at Barnes and Noble weighs in with a review.
Mary Whipple on "Seeing the World Through Books": "Once again, Richard Powers has created a novel which reinvigorates the concept of the 'novel of ideas,'"
How To Furnish a Room
Mostly Fiction
Tony's Book World
bookeywookey: "Three very important words: new Richard Powers."
Salmagundi: Newport, Oregon, Public Library
Laguna Dispatch: "I love this writer. He makes me think, he makes me laugh, and sometimes cry, but never manipulates my emotions. No escapist fiction, rather an intelligent exploration of human potential, and failure, ever so much more meaningful than the harsh reality of harsh reality."
Picks of the Week
Evan Selinger's "Philosophy of Technology" blog: "His most accessibly written work, the text breathes fresh life into the basic questions concerning the nature, scope, and desirability of enhancing personal and collective forms of experience."
Rockaliser Baby: Best fiction book of the decade!
Food For Thought (in Dutch)
Emerging Writers Network: "But the best novel I’ve read in this overwhelming crop of new fiction is Richard Powers’ Generosity: An Enhancement. Powers is always good, always a heady mix of good storytelling and extravagant ideas, normally having something to do with science and its ethical dilemmas. This is one of his best."
Chazz W. "...a work of fiction qua non-fiction, that is so dense, so full of ideas, so miraculously constructed, yet so joyous to read, that a normal “review” simply cannot do it justice. Certainly, I can’t do it justice in the normal way. Perhaps I’m doomed to fail with any approach. But I’ll soldier on." An unusually ambitious web review.
"Unignorable Possibilities" on LabLit.com: review by Jon Turney.
Puck, by Brian Charles Clark.
The Faster Times. Review by Vincent Rossmeier.
The Last Word.
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
New edition of Gain set for September 29 release
Picador will release a new paperback edition of Powers's Gain on September 29, coinciding with the release date for Generosity: An Enhancement.
Big day!
Powers essay, and essay about Powers in new literary compendium
Powers is present as both author and subject in the newly-issued, massive American literary history edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, A New Literary History of America.
The essay by Powers appears on pages 434-440, and is titled, in the chronological manner of the book's entries, "1897, Memorial Day," subtitled "'Choose life and die': Augustus Saint-Gaudens's bas-relief is unveiled on Boston Common." Powers explores the evolving meaning of the monument to Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th regiment, the first all-African-American regiment fielded by the North in the Civil War.
The essay about Powers is by one of the book's editors, Greil Marcus (a favorite critic of mine, who has written wonderfully about Bob Dylan, among many topics), and is titled "2003: Joseph Strom sets down his brother's story." It's a wonderful essay on The Time of Our Singing. Among Marcus's observations:
It is no small thing to write two perfect pages--two pages where the reader cannot find the seams, the artifice, the vanity of art.
A high compliment, indeed.
Update: an interview with Marcus on the The Arts Fuse, contains this statement by Marcus:
For example, one of the last essays in the book is mine on the Richard Powers novel “The Time of Our Singing.” I would stand on the claim that that is the great novel written by an American in the last 20 years, maybe farther back than that. The book specifically addresses the American argument about how the nation came to be what it is, whether or not the country even exists, a country that betrays all of its own promises. Does our nation exist at all, that is the question raised in that novel.
It is not a political or didactic novel, it is a story about people and it is a tragedy, one whose last page will leave you smiling through your tears. And so there is a specific entry on this novel and there is nothing on John Updike, nothing on Don DeLillo, and nothing on John Cheever. Well, I would argue that this novel outweighs the life’s work of those writers. But we didn’t have that discussion on those terms – it was we want that book in this book, so it is here.
Thursday, September 3, 2009
New post on Generosity on Muse Machine
Nice teaser quote from Chris Tucker, a writer who is working on a review of Generosity.
Granta to include Powers piece in Fall 2009 issue
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
"Generosity" named by bookseller Elaine Petrocelli as a September pick
Always nice to see Powers included in this kind of list--Elaine Petrocelli owns Marin County's Book Passage independent bookstore, a wonderful place.
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