Passing Mention of Powers in NYT

In Tom Bissell's New York Times review of Season of Ash, by Jorge Volpi, this line caught my eye:

A few Americans have experimented with such Mendelian crossbreeding before, most notably Richard Powers in novels like “Gain,” but Powers has an uncanny ability to lay waste to the familiar with bombshells of fictional invention.

Call for Papers: Richard Powers Conference in Germany, November 2010

Call for Papers

Ideas of Order: Narrative Patterns in the Novels of Richard Powers

University of Erlangen-Nuremberg: November 26-27, 2010

According to Richard Powers, whose ten novels to date have generated a lively critical discourse, literature needs to engage with all the available modes of knowledge and representation to examine how identity is constituted in culturally situated relations. Powers insists that “you cannot understand a person minimally, you cannot understand a person simply as a function of his inability to get along with his wife, you cannot even understand a person through his supposedly causal psychological profile.” Powers’s novels engage with this understanding of the individual as a complex system that exceeds the mere sum of its parts by implementing narrative patterns which establish parallels and symmetries between radically different levels of experience. However, the patterns and systems created in his novels are less predefined templates that would reduce the inherent complexity of the world in order to enable its representation. They are much rather self-consciously symmetric narratives that function as self-referential artifices through which the world can be refracted and ultimately reaffirmed. Consequently, Powers’s novels are described as hovering between the poles of mimetic realism and metafictional postmodernism, creating narratives in which the conventions of realism are both deployed and undermined, in which characters are simultaneously presented as motivated agents and as textual constructs.

Taking its cue from Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Idea of Order at Key West,” in which the lyrical voice witnesses a “blessed rage for order” that is nevertheless presented as provisional and ephemeral, the conference aims at establishing a critical approach to Powers’s oeuvre which acknowledges and investigates the implications of the distinct poetics of his novels. For this purpose we invite papers on a variety of topics, including Powers’s implementation of narrative systems, patterns, and symmetries; the connection between narrative and identity in his novels; the discursive specificity, argumentative strengths and intellectual relevance Powers’s novels attribute to literary writing; the dimensions of reality, realism and metafiction around which his texts revolve; questions of consciousness and character, agency and determinism as they emerge from Powers’s fiction, as well as the discourses of ethics and aesthetics, science and literature, humanism and post-humanism.

Proposals should not exceed a length of 500 words and can be submitted until 03/31/2010 to the organizers of the conference:

Prof. Dr. Antje Kley
Institute for English and American Studies
University of Erlangen-Nuremberg
Bismarckstr. 1
91054 Erlangen
Tel. +49(0)9131-85-22439/-23440
antje.kley@amer.phil.uni-erlangen.de

Dr. des. Jan D. Kucharzewski
Institute for English and American Studies
University of Hamburg
Von-Melle-Park 6
20146 Hamburg
Tel. +49(0)40-42838-4700
jan.kucharzewski@uni-hamburg.de

http://www.ideasoforder.de (As of February 2010)

Powers Intro to 25th Anniversary Edition of "White Noise"

Richard Powers has written an introduction to the 25th Anniversary edition of Don DeLillo's White Noise.

"With whiplashing jump cut between lampoon and compassion, DeLillo turns a hilarious domestic travesty into one of the great, unlikely family romances of the last hundred years," writes Powers....

Powers to Speak at University of Minnesota in April 2010

Powers is scheduled to speak in the The Esther Freier Endowed Lectures in Literature series on April 14, 2010. Might be worth a trip to the Twin Cities!

Chicago Tribune names Generosity to Its Favorite Fiction of 2009 List

Generosity has claimed a place on the Chicago Tribune's annual favorite fiction list.

In this clever tale, a bitter writing professor in Chicago finds himself drawn to an unnaturally happy student who appears to have a euphoric genetic glitch.

"Generosity" Makes NY Times List of 100 Notable Books for 2009

Powers has made the 2009 New York Times 100 Notable Books list. In her intro to the list, Janet Maslin writes

The selections on our 10-book lists winnow down a wide array of possibilities. Of the tens of thousands of books published each year, the daily Times reviews only about 250. Each of us chose his or her share of those titles for review. Now Michiko Kakutani, Dwight Garner and I further narrow down those choices, and each of us can tell you which 10 books we’ll remember best.

Audrey Niffenegger in The Guardian on Generosity

A number of writers wrote this past weekend in the Guardian about their favorite reads of the year. Audrey Niffenegger wrote this, including Generosity, among others:

My favourite book this year was The Little Stranger, by Sarah Waters. A middle-aged doctor gradually insinuates himself into the life of the Ayres family; they are the owners of a once stately, now crumbling but beautiful house, Hundreds Hall. Waters writes with great restraint and precision of how the house begins to turn on the family with poltergeistian aggression. It's a terrific consideration of the ravages of class in post-war Britain, and a ripping ghost story, too. Two other excellent books are On Monsters (OUP), by Stephen Asma, a very readable and surprising history of every sort of monster, from the Biblical to the biotechnical, and Generosity (Atlantic), by Richard Powers. Powers is one of the best writers working now, and Generosity is full of agile sentences and odd characters. It features a young woman who is always simply happy; this strikes all the other characters as being so unusual that she soon comes under the scrutiny of scientists and the media.