UNITED STATES AUTHOR · FICTION · INTERIOR DECORATION
Richard Powers
Also known as: Powers Richard
Architectural photographer
Years later, when she surfaced again, Adie Klarpol couldn't say just how she'd pictured the place.
— from Plowing the dark, 2000
Most acclaimed
Generosity
2007
From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. About halfway into Powers's follow-up to his National Book Award–winning The Echo Maker, a Nobel Prize-winning author, during a panel discussion, talks about how genetic enhancement represents the end of human nature.... A story with no end or impediment is no story at all. This then, is a story with both. Its hero, at least initially, is Russell Stone, a failed author of creative nonfiction turned reluctant writing instructor who cannot help transmitting to his students something of his flagging faith in writing. One of them, a Berber Algerian named Thassadit Amzwar, is so possessed by preternatural happiness that she's nicknamed Miss Generosity by her prematurely jaded classmates and has emerged from the Algerian civil war that claimed the lives of her parents glowing like a blissed out mystic. After Stone learns that Thassadit may possess a rare euphoric trait called hyperthymia, her condition is upgraded from behavioral to genetic, and Powers's novel makes a dramatic shift when Thassadit falls into the hands of Thomas Kurton, the charismatic entrepreneur behind genetics lab Truecyte, whose plan to develop a programmable genome to regulate the brain's set point for well-being may rest in Miss Generosity's perpetually upbeat alleles. Much of the tension behind Powers's idea-driven novels stems from the delicate balance between plot and concept, and he wisely adopts a voice that is—sometimes painfully—aware of the occasional strain (I'm caught... starving to death between allegory and realism, fact and fable, creative and nonfiction). Like Stone and Kurton, Powers strays from mere record to attempt an impossible task: to make the world right. (Oct.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Bewilderment
"A heartrending new novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning and #1 New York Times best-selling author of The Overstory. "Richard Powers, whose novels combine the wonders of science with the marvels of art, astonishes us in different ways with each new book." -Heller McAlpin, NPR Books. The astrobiologist Theo Byrne searches for life throughout the cosmos while single-handedly raising his unusual nine-year-old, Robin, following the death of his wife. Robin is a warm, kind boy who spends hours painting elaborate pictures of endangered animals. He's also about to be expelled from third grade for smashing his friend in the face. As his son grows more troubled, Theo hopes to keep him off psychoactive drugs. He learns of an experimental neurofeedback treatment to bolster Robin's emotional control, one that involves training the boy on the recorded patterns of his mother's brain. . . . With its soaring descriptions of the natural world, its tantalizing vision of life beyond, and its account of a father and son's ferocious love, Bewilderment marks Richard Powers's most intimate and moving novel. At its heart lies the question: How can we tell our children the truth about this beautiful, imperiled planet?"--
The Time of Our Singing
2003
"Tout commence en 1939, lorsque Delia Daley et David Strom se rencontrent à un concert de Marian Anderson. Peut-on alors imaginer qu'une jeune femme noire épouse un juif allemand fuyant le nazisme? Et pourtant ... Leur passion pour la musique l'emporte sur les conventions et offre à leur amour un sanctuaire de paix où, loin des hurlements du monde et de ses vicissitudes, ils élèvent leurs trois enfants. Chacun d'eux cherche sa voix dans la grande cacophonie américaine, inventant son destin en marge des lieux communs : Jonah embrasse une prometteuse carrière de ténor, Ruth, la cadette, lutte aux côtés des Black Panthers, tandis que Joseph essaye, coûte que coûte, de préserver l'harmonie familiale. Peuplé de personnages d'une humanité rare, 'Le temps où nous chantions' couvre un demi-siècle d'histoire américaine, nous offrant, au passage, des pages inoubliables sur la musique." [Source : 4e de couv.]