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.

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)