"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.