Richard Powers: American Novelist

Powers Galleys on abebooks.com

2011-10-12T13:32:00.000-07:00

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?"

2011-08-09T09:40:00.000-07:00

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

2011-07-05T14:43:00.000-07:00

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

2011-03-28T14:25:00.000-07:00

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

2011-03-04T15:09:00.000-08:00

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

2011-02-10T08:33:00.000-08:00

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?"

2011-02-06T20:47:00.000-08:00

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

2011-01-17T09:38:00.000-08:00

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

2011-01-14T16:41:00.000-08:00

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).

Course Wiki on Powers

2010-10-12T14:01:00.000-07:00

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"

2010-10-12T10:12:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-11T11:50:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-01T09:16:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-04T09:47:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-01T09:00:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-21T09:34:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-21T09:14:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-30T09:22:00.001-07:00

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

2010-04-14T08:30:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-13T09:27:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-01T12:04:00.000-07:00

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

2010-01-04T14:04:00.000-08:00

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.

Passing Mention of Powers in NYT

2009-12-18T06:24:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-17T09:23:00.000-08:00

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"

2009-12-15T11:52:00.001-08:00

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

2009-12-11T09:35:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-06T14:54:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-03T12:58:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-01T16:00:00.001-08:00

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.

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

2009-11-25T16:08:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-25T11:52:00.000-08:00

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"

2009-11-24T08:34:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-21T11:36:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-13T08:44:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-12T12:46:00.001-08:00

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

2009-11-12T12:41:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-12T12:38:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-10T08:36:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-06T11:37:00.000-08:00

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." "

Fascinating Look at Language Use in a Powers Interview

2009-10-28T13:58:00.000-07:00

Wow--this blogger (Language Log) listened to the Studio360 interview (see yesterday's posts) and deconstructed it to place where Powers uses falls or rises within the context of his speech patterns and the context of the substance of what he is saying. Fascinating--not sure I'd want to be examined at quite that level of detail, myself.

Studio360.org Clip of Powers Reading from Generosity

2009-10-27T15:11:00.000-07:00

To go with their interview with Powers, the folks at Studio360.org have also posted a clip of Powers reading from Generosity. See below:

Interview with Powers on Studio360

2009-10-27T14:59:00.000-07:00

From the Studio360 website:

For years Richard Powers has based his novels on challenging ideas and controversies from modern science. His latest is Generosity: An Enhancement -- Powers tells Kurt how he came to the story of an inexplicably happy young woman and the genetic engineer who wants her secret.

Powers Story in Black Clock 11

2009-10-20T13:22:00.000-07:00

"Over the Limited," a Powers story "freely adapted" from Generosity, appears in the forthcoming issue of Black Clock, Number 11.

Peter D. Kramer Has More To Say

2009-10-16T09:16:00.000-07:00

Hmmm. After writing a review of Generosity in Slate, in which he takes Powers to task for allegedly basing his novel on faulty science, Peter D. Kramer now weighs in with a semi-apologetic partial recanting of his position in a column in Psychology Today.

Powers's Granta Story Now Online

2009-10-16T08:57:00.000-07:00

An essay by Powers, "Soaked," is included in the current issue of Granta (#108), which features everything Chicago.

Wall Street Journal Interview with Powers

2009-10-02T13:18:00.000-07:00

This interview centers on Generosity.

From the intro:

As novelists go, Richard Powers may be uniquely qualified to write about the budding genomics industry. In 1991, he wrote "The Gold Bug Variations," a novel about scientists who discovered the chemical structure of DNA. In 2008, he became one of the first nine people in the world to have his entire genome sequenced —a process that involves mapping out and analyzing some six billion DNA nucleotides. The experiment showed, among other things, that Mr. Powers, 52 years old, shares genetic traits with the Yoruba population of Ibadan, Nigeria, and that his 11th chromosome carries a longer version of the DRD4 gene, which predisposes him to seeking out new experiences.

Le temps où nous chantions (Richard Powers)

2009-09-30T11:05:00.001-07:00

Le temps où nous chantions (Richard Powers)
Originally uploaded by Enn'

A fun picture on Flickr of the French translation of The Time of Our Singing.

Bloggers weigh in on Generosity

2009-09-28T09:34:00.000-07:00

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.

New edition of Gain set for September 29 release

2009-09-23T15:38:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-23T14:04:00.000-07:00

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.

New post on Generosity on Muse Machine

2009-09-03T13:15:00.001-07:00

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

2009-09-03T13:06:00.000-07:00

I'll try to track down more info on this asap, but an upcoming piece in Granta looks likely to be some kind of excerpt from Generosity.

Here's a video about the Chicago issue of Granta.

"Generosity" named by bookseller Elaine Petrocelli as a September pick

2009-09-02T16:02:00.001-07:00

Always nice to see Powers included in this kind of list--Elaine Petrocelli owns Marin County's Book Passage independent bookstore, a wonderful place.

Thumb Drives and Oven Clocks blog reviews "Generosity"

2009-08-19T08:35:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading Generosity: An Enhancement myself, and I find the review posted yesterday on the Thumb Drives and Oven Clocks blog to be very close to the way I feel about this book. The reviewer, Darby M. Dixon III, makes an excellent point about Powers's use of the here-and-now in this book, and urges us all to get out and read it right away, because, as he points out, "[Generosity] is at this moment becoming a historical document (and it hasn't even been released yet)."

Powers Set for Miami Book Fair Appearance

2009-08-14T08:28:00.000-07:00

Richard Powers will be the featured speaker at November's Miami Book Fair International, according to a report in the Miami Times Blog yesterday.

Case in point, the final "Evenings With..." this year is Richard Powers, a lesser known novelist who might otherwise get lumped into the weekend schedule, but whose talent, resume, and literary standing certainly qualify for a Friday night reading.

Powers will appear on Friday the 13th of November. I'm hoping they feel lucky down there in Miami!

Powers Included in new McSweeney's Anthology

2009-07-30T13:39:00.000-07:00

McSweeney's has just published a new anthology of some of the best writing from their exceptional magazine, The Believer. Richard Powers's essay, "A Brief Take on Genetic Screening," from the March 2006 issue, is included.

Five Ways of Looking at a Richard Powers novel

2009-07-14T16:19:00.000-07:00

A posting from today about the video pieces produced by the Ninth Letter awhile back, in the blog Mark Athitakis’ American Fiction Notes.

Proof Copy of Three Farmer's

2009-05-15T15:08:00.000-07:00

For those looking to complete their collections, or who want to help me complete mine, there's a copy of the advance proof of Powers's first novel, Three Farmer's On Their Way To a Dance, available through Serendipity books.

8 vo. Uncorrected proof. Pictorial wrappers. Laid in is a pictorial postcard which reproduces the famous Sander photograph on the front wrapper. A fine copy of this advance printing of the author's first book which signaled the arrival of a major new talent on the literary scene. Provenance: Larry Moskowitz.

Only $1,500!

Richard Powers's High School Yearbook

2009-05-13T10:24:00.000-07:00

This struck me as a very unusual item for the collector of Richard Powers material who just plain has too much money: a copy of his high school yearbook, plus some issues of the high school magazine, for $1,750. (Click the title link above to see the item for sale via abebooks.com).
If anyone buys this, I hope you'll let us know if it contains any surprises!
The item description says

Screwbound printed yellow binder. Quarto. The wrapperbound year book, The Kalibre, bound with ten of twelve possible issues of the school newspaper, The Barblet (lacking issues seven and ten), for author Richard Powers' (here referred to mostly as Rick Powers) senior year of high school. Slight tears in the yellow cloth binder, some pages well-thumbed, student inscriptions in the year book, and a couple of leaves loose but sound, a very good example. Powers is pictured on at least three pages in the year book, twice in band pictures, and once in the National Honor Society, although curiously, he is not represented by a senior class picture. According to biographies of Powers he spent much of his high school time in Thailand, and only returned to DeKalb to finish high school, and was perhaps thus not present for the photo. He also appears at least three times in the issues of The Barblet, twice playing the cello, and once at a National Honor Society Assembly (we have by no means exhaustively searched the bound volume and may have missed other appearances). According to our research, Powers is the second most important graduate of the high school, after supermodel Cindy Crawford.

I love that: "second most important graduate...after Cindy Crawford."!

Publication Date Set for Generosity: An Enhancement

2009-05-12T14:40:00.000-07:00

Richard Powers's tenth novel, Generosity: An Enhancement, is scheduled for publication on September 29, 2009.

Pre-order Generosity: An Enhancement
here and support the Richard Powers website.

Here's the publisher's blurb:

FROM THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD–WINNING AUTHOR OF THE ECHO MAKER, A PLAYFUL AND PROVOCATIVE NOVEL ABOUT THE DISCOVERY OF THE HAPPINESS GENE
When Chicagoan Russell Stone finds himself teaching a Creative Nonfiction class, he encounters a young Algerian woman with a disturbingly luminous presence. Thassadit Amzwar’s blissful exuberance both entrances and puzzles the melancholic Russell. How can this refugee from perpetual terror be so happy? Won’t someone so open and alive come to serious harm? Wondering how to protect her, Russell researches her war-torn country and skims through popular happiness manuals. Might her condition be hyperthymia? Hypomania? Russell’s amateur inquiries lead him to college counselor Candace Weld, who also falls under Thassa’s spell. Dubbed Miss Generosity by her classmates, Thassa’s joyful personality comes to the attention of the notorious geneticist and advocate for genomic enhancement, Thomas Kurton, whose research leads him to announce the genotype for happiness.

Russell and Candace, now lovers, fail to protect Thassa from the growing media circus. Thassa’s congenital optimism is soon severely tested. Devoured by the public as a living prophecy, her genetic secret will transform both Russell and Kurton, as well as the country at large.

What will happen to life when science identifies the genetic basis of happiness? Who will own the patent? Do we dare revise our own temperaments? Funny, fast, and finally magical, Generosity celebrates both science and the freed imagination. In his most exuberant book yet, Richard Powers asks us to consider the big questions facing humankind as we begin to rewrite our own existence.

Plowing The Dark is published in French

2009-05-05T09:30:00.001-07:00

Click the title of this blog entry to read a review, in French, of the recently-published French language translation of Plowing the Dark.

Dragon + Olympus = ?

2009-05-04T08:33:00.000-07:00

From Middle Tennessee State University Philosophy Professor Phil Oliver's "Up@Dawn" blog, a piece about his own beginning efforts to use voice-recognition software.

Posting on Children in The Gold Bug Variations

2009-03-12T10:34:00.000-07:00

A Vanderbilt University blog on Genetics and Literature has a recent post on attitudes towards children in Powers's Gold Bug Variations.

An excerpt:

By reconceiving of children as cyclical, endless processes, the scientist [Ressler] invokes what Clayton [Jay Clayton, author of Charles Dickens in Cyberspace] refers to as “genome time,” which is unconcerned with the existence of the individual; but by emotionally breaking down at an encounter with an individual child, Ressler (and by extension Powers) privileges the human as well.

You can read the entire post by following the link in the title of this post.

New Facebook page for Richard Powers Fans

2009-02-24T14:01:00.000-08:00

OK, the page I set up back in November attracted over a hundred Powers enthusiasts, but unfortunately, it appeared to the world as if Powers was in charge of the page himself, and at his request, I have changed that.

So, if you signed up for that page, please visit the new version via the title link for this post, and sign up for the new Richard Powers Fans page.

Thanks!

A Body of Individuals: The Paradox of Community in Contemporary Fiction

2009-02-23T13:18:00.001-08:00

A new book by Sue-Im Lee, published by Ohio State Press, includes writing about Richard Powers, along with other contemporary U.S. writers such as Toni Morrison, Karen Tei Yamashita, Lydia Davis, Lynne Tillman, and David Markson.

From the description:

Why are some versions of the collective “we” admired and desired while other versions are scorned and feared? A Body of Individuals: The Paradox of Community in Contemporary Fiction examines the conflict over the collective “we” through discourses of community. In the discourse of benevolent community, community is a tool towards achieving healing, productiveness, and connection. In the discourse of dissenting community, community that serves a function is simply another name for totalitarianism; instead, community must merely be a fact of coexistence. What are the sources and the appeal of these irreconcilable views of community, and how do they interact in contemporary fiction’s attempt at imagining “we”?

By engaging contemporary U.S. writers such as Toni Morrison, Richard Powers, Karen Tei Yamashita, Lydia Davis, Lynne Tillman, and David Markson with theorists such as Jean-Luc Nancy, Giorgio Agamben, François Lyotard, Ernesto Laclau, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, this book reveals how the two conflicting discourses of community—benevolent and dissenting—are inextricably intertwined in various literary visions of “we”—“we” of the family, of the world, of the human, and of coexistence.

These literary visions demonstrate, in a way that popular visions of community and postmodern theories of community cannot, the dialectical relationship between the discourses of benevolent community and dissenting community. Sue-Im Lee argues that contemporary fiction’s inability to resolve the paradox results in a model of ambivalent community, one that offers unique insights into community and into the very notion of unity.

Jon Carroll Lists Powers Novel in his Ten Best Column!

2008-12-30T14:17:00.000-08:00

Jon Carroll is a wonderful columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, and he occasionally drops in a mention of Powers into his writing. This year, in his "10 Best" column, he places "The Time of Our Singing" as the "best thing in the past decade." His comment: "You can thank me later."

Thanks, Jon!

New Powers Novel--Scooped!

2008-12-19T15:39:00.000-08:00

Edward Champion's "Reluctant Habits" blog features the news that Farrar, Straus, and Giroux have listed an upcoming Powers novel for October 2009 release, with the title Generosity: An Enhancement.

Facebook Fan Page for Powers

2008-11-10T17:40:00.000-08:00

A couple of days ago, I launched a Facebook page for Richard Powers fans. Please stop by and sign on, and start a discussion!

Update as of February 24, 2009: The original page was incorrectly set up to make it look like Powers himself was posting and reading. I've corrected that, but unfortunately, if you signed up for the first page, I had to delete you. Please visit the new page via the link from the title of this post and sign on again! My apologies, and many thanks. --editor

Obama and Powers

2008-11-07T11:46:00.000-08:00

A fun blog post on Nick's Cafe Canadien comparing Time of Our Singing with Obama's candidacy:

I thought of a book on Tuesday night: the Richard Powers novel The Time of Our Singing, published in 2003. In a roundabout way, it is about Barack Obama.

Nick, in turn, points to an interview with Douglas Hofstadter, author of Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Band, in which he draws a similar line:

One last thing — I think we have to slowly stop talking about people as “black” and “white” as if this were a black-and-white (no pun intended) distinction. Barack Obama is a perfect example. Why is he any more black than he is white? It’s just a convention. When you see him in that photo sitting between his mother’s parents when he was a student at Columbia, you can see that he has as much whiteness in him as he has blackness. The “venerable” old tradition, or convention, of labeling a person “black” if they have even the slightest trace of African “blood” in them is an absurdity that comes straight out of slavery, and we should just drop it. Why is Tiger Woods called “black” rather than “Thai”? We have a lot of collective growing-up to do in our society in this regard. A very powerful book I read in which this idea was a central theme was Richard Powers’ novel “The Time of Our Singing”.

Ninth Letter's Powers Videos Available

2008-11-03T09:42:00.000-08:00

All five Ninth Letter video interpretations of Powers's work are available on their webiste. Thanks to Ninth Letter editor Jodee Stanley for getting in touch to let me know.

1. Issue 10: Time of Our Singing
2. Issue 16: Plowing the Dark
3. Issue 18: The Echo Maker
4. Issue 21: The Gold Bug Variations
5. Issue 24: Galatea 2.2

I'll get these listed in the formal bibliography soon.

Literaire Lente 2007 -- Richard Powers

2008-10-30T13:10:00.000-07:00

A video in Dutch, and with beautiful, poetic animation, about The Echo Maker." Includes video of Powers, and of cranes. Posted on YouTube in April 2007.

Richard Powers on YouTube: Ninth Letter piece

2008-10-30T08:44:00.000-07:00

A lyrical video piece by Ninth Letter, with Powers reading from Time of Our Singing. From Ninth Letter's posting on YouTube about the video:

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.

Over the next several months ninthletter.com will publish all five video works. This interpretation based on The Time of Our Singing is the first installment.

Powers publishes article in GQ on Genome Sequencing

2008-10-18T09:24:00.000-07:00

Powers has an article in the current issue of GQ Magazine on his experience of having his genome sequenced, at the magazine's expense, this past summer.

Here's another blog post on Powers's article, in Mark Athitakis’ American Fiction Notes.

And, adding this on November 3: Looks like Powers has had the piece published in The Guardian as well: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/nov/01/human-genome-sequencing-richard-powers.

University of Illinois Event with WS Merwin, Robert Pinsky, and Richard Powers

2008-10-13T11:15:00.000-07:00

Merwin, Pinsky & Powers: CultureTalk.

Powers to Moderate Talk

This free event will be held on Tuesday, October 28, at 7:30 p.m. at the University of Illinois, Urbana campus. Sounds great!

From the University of Illinois calendar website:

This event brings influential cultural figures to campus to discuss the evolving relationships between the arts and contemporary society.

Dante's masterpiece The Divine Comedy provides the basis for a conversation that coincides with the major academic conference "Translating the Middle Ages," sponsored by the UIUC Program in Medieval Studies and the Center for Translation Studies.

W.S. Merwin, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and essayist, has published over a dozen books of poetry, including The Carrier of Ladders and The River Sound, that have evolved from a medieval formality (echoed in his translation of Dante's Purgatorio) into a more distinctly American voice.

Translator, essayist, teacher, jazz musician, and three-term U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky founded the Favorite Poem Project, an online video database of ordinary people reading their most-cherished poems, and created the anthology Americans' Favorite Poems, now in its 18th printing. He earned the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in poetry and the Howard Morton Landon Translation Award for his translation of Dante's The Inferno.

Richard Powers, National Book Award winner, Pulitzer Prize finalist, Time Magazine Book of the Year honoree, UIUC Swanlund Chair in English, and author of the landmark novel The Gold Bug Variations, will moderate this expedition into the center of Dante's epic poem and its impact on literature, poetic structure, and the depiction of spirituality.

Powers Mentioned as Possible Future Nobel Laureate

2008-10-10T14:03:00.000-07:00

The controversy stirred up by the recent comments by Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, in a story carried by the Associated Press, wound up putting Richard Powers's name into the spotlight as a frequently-mentioned potential future winner of the literature prize.

In a story by Scott McLemee in Inside Higher Ed, Levi Stahl of the University of Chicago Press was quoted:

"What writers might be on the verge of a Nobel-level career? I’m placing my bet on Richard Powers (as did the MacArthur Foundation several years ago): His oeuvre to this point has shown him to possess a restless, inquisitive mind that is unlikely to allow him to repeat himself or settle into a rut, while his ambitious attempts to marry the language and insights of science to psychological realism seems like a reasonable formula for the sort of sweeping masterpiece that could get the Nobel committee’s attention."

Richard Powers in the News

2008-10-10T14:01:00.000-07:00

This blog will cover mentions of Richard Powers and his work in various media, falling outside the scope of the bibliography I maintain at www.richardpowers.net.