Richard Powers
Author
Appears on list
Description
"An air force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back to life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. These four,...
Author
Description
"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....
Author
Pub. Date
2006
Description
On a winter night on a remote Nebraska road, twenty-seven year old Mark Schluter flips his truck in a near fatal accident. His older sister, Karin, returns to nurse Mark back from a traumatic head injury. But when he emerges from a coma, Mark believes that this woman is really an impostor who looks just like his sister. Shattered, Karin contacts the cognitive neurologist Gerald Weber, who eagerly investigates. What he discovers in Mark slowly undermines
...Author
Description
Highly imaginative and emotionally powerful, this stunning novel about childhood innocence amid the nightmarish disease and deterioration at the heart of modern Los Angeles was nominated for a National Book Award. 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. Determined to give hope where there is none, the adults...
5) Orfeo
Author
Description
In Orfeo, Powers tells the story of a man journeying into his past as he desperately flees the present. Composer Peter Els opens the door one evening to find the police on his doorstep. His home microbiology lab-- the latest experiment in his lifelong attempt to find music in surprising patterns-- has aroused the suspicions of Homeland Security. Panicked by the raid, Els turns fugitive. As an Internet-fueled hysteria erupts, Els-- the " Bioterrorist...
Author
Description
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...
7) Gain
Author
Description
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...
Author
Description
Wie kann eine Familie in einer unberechenbaren Welt überleben, ohne zu zerbrechen?
Vater und Sohn allein: Der hochbegabte Robbie mit Asperger-Zügen kann den Tod der Mutter nicht verwinden. In der Schule unverstanden, will er die Mission seiner Mutter vollenden: Er malt Plakate, demonstriert auf den Stufen des Kapitols, um die Natur zu retten. Der verzweifelte junge Vater will ihm mit ungestümer Liebe alles geben. Als Astrobiologe sind ihm die Sterne...
9) Galatea 2.2
Author
Description
Richard Powers, returns to the United States as Humanist-in-Residence at the enormous Center for the Study of Advanced Sciences. There he runs afoul of Philip Lentz, an outspoken cognitive neurologist intent upon modeling the human brain by means of computer-based neural networks. Lentz involves Powers in an outlandish and irresistible project: to train a neural net on a canonical list of Great Books. Through repeated tutorials, the device grows gradually...
Author
Description
A magnificent, multifaceted novel about a supremely gifted -- and divided -- family, set against the backdrop of postwar America On Easter day, 1939, at Marian Anderson's epochal concert on the Washington Mall, David Strom, a German Jewish emigre 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...
11) Plowing the Dark
Author
Description
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,...
Author
Description
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. Stuart Ressler, an up-and-coming molecular biologist, finds his career sidetracked by the turmoil of the sixties, and a young couple of the 1980s tries to discover why the biologist abandoned his scientific pursuits. The Gold Bug Variations is a double love story of two young couples separated by a distance...
Author
Description
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...
14) Orfeo: a novel
Author
Pub. Date
[2014]
Physical Desc
369 pages ; 25 cm
Description
Composer Peter Els --the "Bioterrorist Bach" -- pays a final visit to the people he loves, those who shaped his musical journey and, through the help of his ex-wife, his daughter, and his longtime collaborator, he hatches a plan to turn his disastrous collision with Homeland Security into a work of art that will reawaken its audience to the sounds all around them.
Author
Pub. Date
2009
Physical Desc
296 p. ; 24 cm.
Description
When 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...
Author
Pub. Date
2010, c2009
Physical Desc
561 p. (large print) ; 23 cm.
Description
While teaching a Creative Nonfiction class, Chicagoan Russell Stone encounters a young Algerian woman with a disturbingly luminous presence. Thassadit Amzwar's blissful exuberance entrances and puzzles the melancholic Russell. How can this refugee from perpetual terror be so happy? Russell's amateur inquiries bring Thassa to the attention of a notorious geneticist whose research leads him to announce the genotype for happiness.
Author
Pub. Date
2018.
Physical Desc
502 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm.
Description
7 books. "An air force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back to life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. These...
18) Pygmy
Author
Formats
Description
A gang of adolescent terrorists, a spelling bee, and a terrible plan masquerading as a science project: This is Operation Havoc.
Pygmy is one of a handful of young adults from a totalitarian state sent to the US disguised as exchange students. Living with American families to blend in, they are planning an unspecified act of massive terrorism that will bring this big dumb country and its fat dumb inhabitants to their knees. Palahniuk...
Pygmy is one of a handful of young adults from a totalitarian state sent to the US disguised as exchange students. Living with American families to blend in, they are planning an unspecified act of massive terrorism that will bring this big dumb country and its fat dumb inhabitants to their knees. Palahniuk...
19) Moonheart
Author
Series
Formats
Description
Formatting repaired. Sorry to discover there were glitches in the first upload; if you already purchased this book prior to December 25/13, please download it again (at no cost).Moonheart is the award-winning novel that propelled Charles de Lint to his status as a master of urban fantasy.Unique to this Triskell Press edition is a new afterword by de Lint reminiscing on the impact of his seminal work. We are grateful to Charles Vess for the use of...
Author
Description
For readers of Russell Banks and Richard Ford, a novel about loss, love, and redemption following a catastrophe in a small mining town.
In The Underworld, Kevin Canty tells a story inspired by the facts of a disastrous fire that took place in an isolated silver mining town in Idaho in the 1970s, in which almost everyone in town lost a friend, a lover, a brother, or a husband. The Underworld imagines the fates of a handful of...