Course Wiki on Powers

A very cool thing!

The course being taught this semester at the Rochester Institute of Technology, "Richard Powers: Literature, Philosophy, Innovation," has a wiki containing course topics, notes, and other material. Take a look--click the title link of this post to see it.

Powers Selects Charles Yu for "5 Under 35"

Charles Yu's novel, How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is reviewed in "Scotland on Sunday." Reviewer Stuart Kelly says

Yu's novel is his first, and after a publishing some short stories he was chosen for the "5 Under 35" programme, where former winners of the National Book Award selected one young writer whose work impressed them (Yu was, incidentally, the choice of the underrated Richard Powers).

New Powers Story in the New Yorker

Powers has published a short story, "To the Measures Fall," in the October 18, 2010 issue of "The New Yorker." It's his first in the magazine since February 1988, when an excerpt from the upcoming Prisoner's Dilemma made it into the august pages.

Rick Moody on Richard Powers

Author Rick Moody's piece in today's Louisville Courier-Journal, citing his lifelong and current literary influences has this line about Powers:

Richard Powers, because he always tries something new, in every book, and because he is unafraid to be entirely brilliant.

"The Selves of Richard Powers" article in Illinois Alumni Mag

Excellent article about Powers in the University of Illinois' Alumni Magazine, available online via the title link above. Can't find a date on the online article (Illinois folks--help! I need the exact citation for the bibliography!), but it seems to have come out last year, sometime before the appearance of Generosity.

Update: received email today from the article's author, Mary Timmins, who informs me that the piece was published in the November / December 2007 issue of the magazine. She will be sending me the magazine, and then I'll duly add it to the bibliography. The piece won a won a gold medal in the annual competition sponsored by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education. Thanks, Mary!

An excerpt:

“I did live in relative isolation for the better part of 10 months,” Powers said. “Basically, my days, the ordinary days, would consist of waking up, taking a walk in the woods, writing … reading for six hours and then falling asleep and waking up and doing it all again.” Inhabiting a remote house on Long Island, the novelist went for weeks without human contact, the better to write “Plowing the Dark,” in which a character is held in solitary confinement as a hostage in Beirut. When his captors finally give him a book, Powers said, the character is filled with “this emotionally devastating sense of how lucky we are to see the workings of anybody else’s mind.”

For those who have seen the workings of his mind, Powers is a writer like no other. Over the past 22 years he has produced nine novels that enthrall and educate, underpinning powerful tales of brave, flawed people with intense passages, improbably lyrical, devoted to understanding the world from a scientific standpoint.

“We think we’re a solid thing, we think we’re continuous, we think memory is reliable,” he said, speaking in the resonant, measured tones that evince his lifelong love of music, “when in fact it’s all stories.”

Video Interpretation of The Echo Maker

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's literary journal Ninth Letter has issued the third in a series of video interpretations of Powers novels. This one, by Deke Weaver, features The Echo Maker with a voiceover by Powers.

From the website:

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.

This video interpretation, based on The Echo Maker, is the third installment to appear on ninthletter.com; the first installment, The Time of Our Singing, appeared on this website as podcast number 10, and the second, Plowing the Dark, appeared as podcast number 16. Both are available in our archives.

Program for Powers Conference in Erlangen, Germany: November 2010

An upcoming conference devoted to Powers is slated for November 26-28 at the University of Erlangen‐Nuremberg.

An impressive set of speakers will address a wide variety of topics, including Heinz Ickstadt (Free University, Berlin) presenting “ʹA‐synchronous messagingʹ: The Multiple Functions of Richard Power’s Fictions”; Sabine Sielke (University of Bonn)on “The Subject of Literature, or: (Re‐) Cognition in Richard Powers’s (Science) Fiction”; and Philipp Löffler (University of Heidelberg) addressing “’The Ability to make Worlds’: Lukácsean Aesthetics, Self‐Imagination and Richard Powers’s Plowing the Dark,” among others.

Powers Quotes

This popped up today on my blog alerts--a site with some very nice quotations pulled from Powers's novels. How many more can we find?

Powers short story "Modulation" included in Best of 2009 anthology

Richard Powers's short story "Modulation" has been included in the 2009 edition of Best American Short Stories. Here's a comment from one reviewer:

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.

Powers Reacts to his Induction into the Academy

I received the following note from Powers today, in response to my note of congratulations on his election into the American Academy of Arts and Letters:

Thanks for the good words. It really is a kick, I do admit. But when I look down the list of past and present members, it does seem as if my election might be some kind of clerical error that will be straightened up tactfully at the door when I try to show up for the induction ceremony in May.

Vintage Powers. Congratulations once again!

Powers elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters

Along with the somewhat better-known Meryl Streep, Richard Powers was elected into the elite (250 members) American Academy of Arts and Letters. Streep says she was stunned to be inducted into such an august body. No word yet from Powers, but then, the Associated Press didn't call him for a quote. I'll try to get an exclusive!

Inductees into the main body include authors Marilynne Robinson, Francine Prose, Thomas McGuane and Richard Powers, composers Tania Leon and Fred Lerdahl, architect Thom Mayne and painters Thomas Nozknowski and Peter Saul. Members are elected for life (openings are created when a member dies) and encouraged to serve on committees that distribute prizes, but there is no responsibility beyond agreeing to join.

Interesting thoughts on Powers's book titles

This post is a re-post of a review on Amazon UK. Not sure about who is doing the re-posting, but it's an interesting point of view, asking whether Powers might not be better known, or appeal to more readers, if his books had better titles. I find this interesting because my mom, who loved Powers's books, had a similar thought, in particular about "Operation Wandering Soul" as a title.

Here's an excerpt from the review:

What's the problem? I've alluded to some possibilities---his titles are often clunky and over-cute. 'Operation Wandering Soul', for example. 'Operation' because the protagonist (Richard Kraft---Power in German!) is a surgeon. 'The Gold Bug Variations'--punning, mildly embarrassing. The Time of our singing'---it's about singing, and it's about time! 'Gain', which sounds like the title of a boardroom blockbuster. Etcetera.

Review of Time of Our Singing

Brian Charles Clark reviews Time of Our Singing on his Puck's Blog.

In the fifth century B.C., the Greek philosopher Empedocles wrote, “Come now, hearken to my words; learning will enlarge your mind…. I shall tell of a two-fold process.” The two-fold process of Empedocles is the mind-enlarging weave of ideas that run through the novels of Richard Powers: the struggle between Love and Strife, of Aphrodite versus Thanatos, of remembering and forgetting, of music and science. Powers writes his two-fold vibrations with intense lyricism, fierce intelligence, and the improvisational pacing of a free jazz combo: masters of their instruments, the riffing interplay of sentences is always challenging the reader to keep up, pay attention, read more to fill in the gaps in learning the novels expose.

Clark's review includes a good summary of Powers's previous novels leading up to TOOS.