Richard Powers Books In Order

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (1985)
  2. Prisoner’s Dilemma (1988)
  3. The Gold Bug Variations (1991)
  4. Operation Wandering Soul (1993)
  5. Galatea 2.2 (1995)
  6. Gain (1998)
  7. Plowing the Dark (2000)
  8. The Time of Our Singing (2002)
  9. The Echo Maker (2006)
  10. Generosity (2009)
  11. Orfeo (2014)
  12. The Overstory (2018)
  13. Bewilderment (2021)

Anthologies In Publication Order

  1. The Future Dictionary of America (2004)

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Anthologies Book Covers

Richard Powers Books Overview

Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance

In the spring of 1914, renowned photographer August Sander took a photograph of three young men on their way to a country dance. This haunting image, capturing the last moments of innocence on the brink of World War I, provides the central focus of Powers’s brilliant and compelling novel. As the fate of the three farmers is chronicled, two contemporary stories unfold. The young narrator becomes obsessed with the photo, while Peter Mays, a computer writer in Boston, discovers he has a personal link with it. The three stories connect in a surprising way and provide the reader with a mystery that spans a century of brutality and progress.

Prisoner’s Dilemma

Something is wrong with Eddie Hobson Sr., father of four, sometime history teacher, quiz master, black humorist and virtuoso invalid. His recurring fainting spells have worsened, and with his ingrained aversion to doctors, his worried family tries to discover the nature of his sickness. Meanwhile, in private, Eddie puts the finishing touches on a secret project he calls Hobbstown, a place that he promises will save him, the world and everything that’s in it. A dazzling novel of compassion and imagination, Prisoner’s Dilemma is a story of the power of invalid experience.

The Gold Bug Variations

A national bestseller, voted by Time as the 1 novel of 1991, selected as one of the ‘Best Books of 1991’ by Publishers Weekly, and nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award a magnificent story that probes the meaning of love, science, music, and art, by the brilliant author of Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance.

Operation Wandering Soul

Tired and overworked, surgical resident Richard Kraft finds his protective shell shattered when, along with his physiotherapist, he begins to view the children’s ward of the hospital.Tour.

Galatea 2.2

After several years abroad, novelist Richard Powers the fictional protagonist of the story returns to America and accepts the position of Humanist in Residence at the enormous and prestigious Center for the Study of Advanced Sciences. There, he meets Philip Lentz, an outspoken neurologist intent on creating a model of the human brain with computer based neural networks, and together they embark on an outlandishly ambitious project to teach the neural net English literature so that it can pass a difficult master’s exam. As their experiment progresses, their brain child absorbs more and more information, gradually becoming increasingly worldly. Soon, it demands to know its name, sex, race and reason for existing. Meanwhile, this literary crash course sparks in Powers a parallel awakening, and he begins a reconsideration of his chosen profession, his decade long, failed relationship with a former pupil and his obsession with the master’s candidate against whom his cybernetic pupil is slated to compete.

Gain

Gain braids together two stories on very different scales. In one, Laura Body, divorced mother of two and a real estate agent in the small town of Lacewood, Illinois, plunges into a new existence when she learns that she has ovarian cancer. In the other, Clare & Company, a soap manufacturer begun by three brothers in nineteenth century Boston, grows over the course of a century and a half into an international consumer products conglomerate based in Laura’s hometown. Clare’s stunning growth reflects the kaleidoscopic history of America; Laura Body’s life is changed forever by Clare. The novel’s stunning conclusion reveals the countless invisible connections between the largest enterprises and the smallest lives.

Plowing the Dark

In a digital laboratory on the shores of Puget Sound, a band of virtual reality researchers race to complete the Cavern, an empty white room that can become a jungle, a painting, or a vast Byzantine cathedral. In a war torn Mediterranean city, an American is held hostage, chained to a radiator in another empty white room. What can possibly join two such remote places? Only the shared imagination, a room that these people unwittingly build in common, where they are all about to meet, where the dual frames of this inventive novel to coalesce. Adie Klarpol, a skilled but disillusioned artist, comes back to life, revived by the thrill of working with the Cavern’s cutting edge technology. Against the collapse of Cold War empires and the fall of the Berlin Wall, she retreats dangerously into the cyber realities she has been hired to create. As her ex husband lies dying and the outbreak of computerized war fills her with a sense of guilty complicity, Adie is thrown deeper into building a place of beauty and unknown power, were she might fend off the incursions of the real world gone wrong. On the other side of the globe, Taimur Martin, an English teacher retreating from a failed love affair, is picked up off the streets in Beirut by Islamic fundamentalists and held in solitary captivity. Without distraction or hope of release, he must keep himself whole by the force of his memory alone. Each infinite, empty day moves him closer to insanity, and only the surprising arrival of sanctuary sustains him for the shattering conclusion. Plowing the Dark is fiction that explores the imagination’s power to both destroy and save.

The Time of Our Singing

A magnificent, multifaceted novel about a supremely gifted and divided family, set against the backdrop of postwar AmericaOn Easter day, 1939, at Marian Anderson’s epochal concert on the Washington Mall, David Strom, a German Jewish migr scientist, meets Delia Daley, a young Philadelphia Negro studying to be a singer. Their mutual love of music draws them together, and against all odds and better judgment they marry. They vow to raise their children beyond time, beyond identity, steeped in song. But their three children must survive America’s brutal here and now. Jonah, Joseph, and Ruth grow up during the Civil Rights era, come of age in the violent 1960s, and live out adulthood in the racially retrenched late century. Jonah, the eldest, ‘whose voice could make heads of state repent,’ follows a life in his parents’ beloved classical music. Ruth, the youngest, chooses a militant activism and repudiates the white culture her brother represents. Joseph, the middle child and the narrator of this generational tale, struggles to remain connected to them both. The Time of Our Singing is a story of self invention, allegiance, race, cultural ownership, the compromised power of music, and the tangled loops of time that rewrite all belonging.

The Echo Maker

On a winter night on a remote Nebraska road, 27 year old Mark Schluter flips his truck in a near fatal accident. His older sister Karin, his only near kin, returns reluctantly to their hometown to nurse Mark back from a traumatic head injury. But when he emerges from a protracted coma, Mark believes that this woman who looks, acts, and sounds just like his sister is really an identical impostor. Shattered by her brother’s refusal to recognize her, Karin contacts the cognitive neurologist Gerald Weber, famous for his case histories describing the infinitely bizarre worlds of brain disorder. Weber recognizes Mark as a rare case of Capgras Syndrome, a doubling delusion, and eagerly investigates. What he discovers in Mark slowly undermines even his own sense of being. Meanwhile, Mark, armed only with a note left by an anonymous witness, attempts to learn what happened the night of his inexplicable accident. The truth of that evening will change the lives of all three beyond recognition. Set against the Platte River’s massive spring migrations one of the greatest spectacles in nature The Echo Maker is a gripping mystery that explores the improvised human self and the even more precarious brain that splits us from and joins us to the rest of creation.

Generosity

FROM THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNING AUTHOR OF THE ECHO MAKER, A PLAYFUL AND PROVOCATIVE NOVEL ABOUT THE DISCOVERY OF THE HAPPINESS GENEWhen 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.

The Future Dictionary of America

This book was conceived by Safran Foer Foer, Nicole Krauss, and Dave Eggers as a way to bring over a hundred authors together to promote progressive causes in the November 2004 election. The book is an imagining of what a dictionary might look like about thirty years hence, when all of the world’s problems are solved and our current president is a distant memory. The book is by turns funny, outraged, utopian, and dyspeptic. Over 150 writers contributed to the book, including: Stephen King, Robert Olen Butler, Glen David Gold, Richard Powers, Susan Straight, Sarah Vowell, Billy Collins, C.K. Williams, Colson Whitehead, Donald Antrim, Jonathan Franzen, Edwidge Danticat, Edward Hirsch, Joyce Carol Oates, Katha Pollitt, Padgett Powell, Paul Auster, Anthony Swofford, Julia Alvarez, Susan Choi, Jim Shepard, Aimee Bender, and Art Spiegelman. Hardcover editions of the book will also include a CD compilation, with all new songs by the best musicians working. Among them: David Byrne, R.E.M., Death Cab for Cutie, Moby, Sleater Kinney, Flaming Lips, Tom Waits, Yo La Tengo, Bright Eyes, They Might Be Giants, Elliott Smith, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

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