Powers makes Evers's 50 Best Books of the Decade List

Stuart Evers, author of the Dirty/Realistic blog, has placed The Time of Our Singing at number nine of his 50 best novels of the decade of the 2000's.

Richard Powers has defeated me so many times with his novels that though I was excited about The Time of Our Singing, I did worry that this was going to be another book of his that I admired without loving and once again didn’t finish. I needn’t have bothered worrying. This is just awesome stuff, truly spellbinding in every way. There’s a famous quote about writing about music being like dancing about architecture, which is made to look like sagging bollocks when you read about the music you can’t hear in The Time of Our Singing.

"Morephisms" Post on Latour and Powers

For a very interesting bit of reading that may challenge your Thanksgiving-addled brains, I recommend this post on We Have Never Been Blogging by Mike Johnduff.

In it, Johnduff looks at Bruno Latour's take on Richard Powers, and it is definitely worth reading in light of the frequent accusation (see James Wood) that Powers doesn't convey character well. Here's a taste:

This doesn't seem to me to be a big deal--except that it seems typically philosophical, which is something I don't usually expect from Latour since what he's up to usually appears so very different in its form. I'll put differently: Ultimately, what reviewers I think object to in Powers is his taking his de-priveliging of character in the psychological, anthropomorphic sense to the nth degree. However, when Powers does this full-on, in his recent The Echo Maker, he precisely gets the National Book Association award and is a finalist for the Pulitzer... so go figure. Meanwhile narratology has long picked up this issue of the over-anthropomorphization of characters, even when they're made into actants. So, the situation is complicated. Latour comes along and oversimplifies it--as anyone who confronted such a situation would. But he also does so in a typically philosophical way: he wants to presume we all read like 19th century readers of Dickens, or present-day readers of Harry Potter, in order to demystify that fact. This leaves us with the sense that, yet again, we're getting an essay on the "aesthetic dimension" of a philosophy, or the review of a piece which best exemplifies this work--a task which has to say all the considerations before it appears take the function of art in the wrong way.

Teen Discussion of "Enquire Within Upon Everything"

The annual content of Dave Eggers's project, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, is selected entirely by high school students. In a recent discussion, they look at the recent Powers short story, "Enquire Within Upon Everything." Definitely worth a read! (Click title of this post to go to the Best American Nonrequired Reading blog.)

Elise: The ways that humans interact with technology, and the degree to which technology controls our lives – that’s an idea that really seems to interest people right now. This story articulates that concept really well.

Powers's "Modulation" Included in Best American Shorts Stories 2009

Powers's short story, "Modulation," has been selected for this year's issue of Best American Short Stories, edited by Alice Sebold and and Heidi Pitlor. The Wall Street Journal reviewed the anthology today, and a reviewer on Amazon.com noted:

There is one story which rises far above the others, due to the writer's craftsmanship: Richard Powers' "Modulation". Powers mixes together a variety of dissimilar characters scattered around the globe and ties them all together with a science fiction storyline that conveys the power and importance of music in the present day. Powers has excellent command of the English language and keen observational skills, and it is hard to imagine how this story could be any better than it is.

Another Post on Powers's Talk in Miami

Blog posting at Open Page, the blog of the Florida Center for the Literary Arts, entitled "‘Brainiac’ novelist Richard Powers: Meaning trumps happiness"

Powers noted, just before he started reading, that “happily” this year brought news calling the “depression gene” study into question. “I was exhilarated,” Powers said.

“It turns out happiness is complicated,” Powers said. “We are confusing happiness with gratification. Happiness is not a commodity that can be bought and sold. It is a process, a long process. We don’t want happiness, we want meaning.”

And a good place to find it is in the challenging, provocative and sometimes funny and romantic novels of Richard Powers.

Richard Powers photos on Flickr

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." "