New Facebook page for Richard Powers Fans

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

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!

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!

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

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

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

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.