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Richard Powers

Biography

Richard Powers

Richard Powers is the author of 13 novels, including THE OVERSTORY and ORFEO, and the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Award. He lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.

Richard Powers

Books by Richard Powers

by Richard Powers - Fiction

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.

by Richard Powers - Fiction

From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, THE OVERSTORY unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late-20th-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours --- vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

by Richard Powers - Fiction

Peter Els is a retired music professor with a unique hobby: He has set up a microbiology lab in his home to find music in the modified DNA of the bacterium Serratia marcescens. When Federal agents find out about his laboratory, they suspect he may be a bioterrorist. ORFEO is the portrait of a man so obsessed by the need to create that he’ll sacrifice just about everything for the sake of his quest.