Powers Galleys on abebooks.com

For those of you out there who might be collectors, take a look at what's on offer these days at abebooks. Some very rare stuff--particularly the proofs of the first two novels. Maybe someday....

New Powers Article: "What Does Fiction Know?"

Powers taught a course in Berlin this past Spring, exploring the collision of fact and fiction in writing, and this is his report from the front lines.

My students have swallowed every bastard hybrid genre I’ve thrown at them. Fictocriticism, mockumentary, staged reality, Borgesian simulated lectures, psycho-journalism, unattributed sampling, hip-hop mashup, real actors playing imaginary authors making pixelated media appearances while selling brutally frank memoirs filled with the slightly altered real-life experiences of some other, dissembling author. My sales pitch has worked so well with this group that, by the end of the semester, I’m appalled at what I’ve unleashed. James Frey, J. T. LeRoy, lonelygirl15, COPS and Survivor and America’s Next Top Model: bring it all on, my German students say. The blurrier the better. They have grown up in a world that laughs at the very distinctions that I’ve come here to challenge, and in class, they regard me with affectionate pity for my quaint belief in the existence of boundaries that a writer might still hope to exploit by transgressing.

Amazon.com Unilaterally Dumps its California Associates

Just FYI for readers of this blog--in the past I have been able to help support this website through amazon associate sales. As of last week, amazon dumped all of its California associates, including yours truly. Therefore I would request that you not purchase any Powers titles through this blog, but patronize your local independent bookstore instead.

Respectfully,

--David Dodd

Powers First Editions

A fun post about the writer's copies of first editions of Powers's first two books: Three Farmers On Their Way To a Dance, and Prisoner's Dilemma.

Powers is Nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award

Powers has been shortlisted for the 2011 Arthur C. Clarke award for the best science fiction published in the U.K.

...and this year's list also sees an author coming in the other direction, with a nomination for Generosity by Richard Powers. Powers, a previous winner of the US National Book Award and the WH Smith literary award, has often written about science in the past, and Generosity explores the biochemistry of happiness.

Powers Writes Epilogue for New Book

Powers has contributed the epilogue for the newly-published volume, Switching Codes: Thinking Through Digital Technology in the Humanities and the Arts, from the University of Chicago Press. The volume includes essays by "leading American and European scholars, scientists, and artists—including Charles Bernstein, Ian Foster, Bruno Latour, Alan Liu, and Richard Powers—to consider how the precipitous growth of digital information and its associated technologies are transforming the ways we think and act."

NY Times Op-Ed piece: "What is Artificial Intelligence?"

Powers has a piece in today's NY Times on the upcoming match between Watson, the computerized Jeopardy player, vs. two real-world Jeopardy champions. Echoes of Galatea 2.2!

The Bell Jar in light of The Echo Maker

A thoughtful essay considering Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar in the context of a reading of Powers's The Echo Maker, on the Tasty Spoonful blog.

An excerpt:

This kind of consideration becomes richer when The Bell Jar is considered in conversation with Richard Powers’s incredibly beautiful book The Echo Maker. Powers’s novel won the National Book Award in 2006, in part because of his masterful expansion of a question that I think lies at the heart of The Bell Jar. His novel offers a very contemporary picture of how mind works within the context of current neuroscience, but also forces us to determine how–in light of such advances–Esther’s description of psychological and physical life as dichotomous might continue to lend us an understanding of ourselves.

Powers mention in an odd place

Fun mention of Powers in an article on the big consumer electronic show:

For me, the convention’s best offering was somewhat of a throwback. It was Sharp Electronics’ i3 Wall, a 5-walled room filled with edge-to-edge HDTVs on every surface. It was the living incarnation of Richard Powers’ Plowing The Dark, and it was gorgeous. Walk up to the room, suspend your disbelief, and you’ll feel like you’re flying over the countryside (assuming Sharp is playing the countryside graphic).