New Releases by Richard Powers

Winner of the National Book Award From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Overstory and the Oprah''s Book Club selection Bewilderment comes Richard Powers''s The Echo Maker, a powerful novel about family and loss. “Wise and elegant . . . The mysteries unfold so organically and stealthily that you are unaware of his machinations until they come to stunning fruition . . . Powers accomplishes something magnificent.” —Colson Whitehead, The New York Times Book Review On a winter night on a remote Nebraska road, twenty-seven-year-old Mark Schluter has a near-fatal car accident. His older sister, Karin, returns reluctantly to their hometown to nurse Mark back from a traumatic head injury. But when Mark emerges from a coma, he believes that this woman—who looks, acts, and sounds just like his sister—is really an imposter. When Karin contacts the famous cognitive neurologist Gerald Weber for help, he diagnoses Mark as having Capgras syndrome. The mysterious nature of the disease, combined with the strange circumstances surrounding Mark’s accident, threatens to change all of their lives beyond recognition. In The Echo Maker, Richard Powers proves himself to be one of our boldest and most entertaining novelists.

Het hersenletsel van een chauffeur als gevolg van een ongeluk is zowel voor hemzelf als voor de mensen die hem bijstaan van invloed op hun verdere leven.

El tiempo de nuestras canciones habla de medio siglo de historia norteamericana girando alrededor de los conflictos raciales, de la historia de la música popular negra que va desde los spirituals al hip-hop, de la teoría de la relatividad y la mística cuántica ... todo esto y mucho más bombardeando los días y las noches de varias generaciones de la familia Strom. La novela está construida con una estructura de contrapunto y así, en capítulos alternativos, vamos conociendo la historia de los padres y de los hijos; historias que al final como cabe esperar, se funden en una para acabar, en las últimas páginas, revelando un portentoso secreto.

“The last novel where I rooted for every character, and the last to make me cry.” - Marlon James, Elle From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Overstory and the Oprah''s Book Club selection Bewilderment comes Richard Powers''s 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 émigré scientist, meets Delia Daley, a young Black Philadelphian studying to be a singer. Their mutual love of music draws them together, and—against all odds and their better judgment—they marry. They vow to raise their children beyond time, beyond identity, steeped only in song. Jonah, Joseph, and Ruth grow up, however, during the civil rights era, coming of age in the violent 1960s, and living 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, devotes herself to community activism and repudiates the white culture her brother represents. Joseph, the middle child and the narrator of this generation-bridging tale, struggles to find himself and remain connected to them both. Richard Powers''s 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.

Tout commence par une photo désormais célèbre : celle de trois fermiers sur une route de campagne, prise par August Sander à la veille de la Première Guerre mondiale. Pourquoi cette photo obsède-t-elle tant le narrateur, depuis qu''il l''a vue par hasard dans un musée de Detroit ? Peter Mays, un jeune journaliste, saura-t-il quant à lui percer l''énigme de son étrange ressemblance avec l''un des personnages ? Qu''est-il advenu enfin de ces trois jeunes hommes ? De l''Europe dévastée par la guerre, où nous suivons les pérégrinations tragi-comiques des fermiers, jusqu''à l''Amérique contemporaine, Richard Powers se livre au jeu des destins croisés et contrariés, convoquant au passage quelques grandes figures telles que Henry Ford ou Sarah Bernhardt.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Playground . " Plowing the Dark is virtual reality composed in a language that will never go obsolete." —Kevin Berger, The San Francisco Chronicle Book Review In a digital laboratory on the shores of Puget Sound, a band of virtual-reality researchers races 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 these two remote places? Only the shared imagination, a room that these people unwittingly build in common, where they are all about to meet. Adie Klarpol, a skilled but disillusioned artist, comes back to life, revived by the thrill of working with 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. On the other side of the globe, Taimur Martin, an English teacher recovering from a failed love affair, is picked up off the streets in Beirut by Islamic fundamentalists and held in solitary captivity. "Superb . . . Powers pulls off one of the most astonishing feats I''ve ever seen in literature . . . daring, unpredictable, and emotionally powerful." —Steven Moore, The Washington Post Book World "A fiercely visual book . . . the effect is spectacular . . . The most visceral prose Powers has ever written." —Daniel Zalewski, The New York Times Book Review "I don''t have the space to do justice to all the wonders of craftsmanship in Plowing the Dark . . . This is the first emblematic novel of the 21st century, a lesson and an inspiration." —Judy Doenges, The Seattle Times

After four novels and several years of living abroad, the fictional protagonist of Galatea 2.2 - Richard Powers - returns to the United States as Humanist-in-Residence at the enormous Center for the Study of Advanced Sciences. There he falls 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 until the machine becomes capable of passing a comprehensive exam in English literature. Through repeated tutorials, the device grows gradually more worldly, until it demands to know its own name, sex, race, and reason for existing. Powers drills it in Chaucer and Austen and James, a crash course that elicits a violent reconsideration of his own literary vocation, his decade-long, failed relationship with a former pupil, and his growing obsession with the twenty-two-year-old master''s candidate against whom his cybernetic Helen is slated to compete.

Vlak voor de Eerste Wereldoorlog werden drie stiefbroers gefotografeerd op weg naar een dansfeest. Deze foto is de inspiratiebron voor drie verhalen.

"Calling the Police! Calling the G-Men! Calling all Americans to War on the Underworld" was the sign-on of the first radio prou00adgram to portray the agents of the FBI as action heroes. Thus began the remarkable collaboration between the government agency and the merchants of popular culture that was to continue for over forty years. In G-Men Richard Gid Powers explores the cultural forces that permitted the rise and fostered the fall of the nation''s secret police as national heroes. He examines popular attitudes toward crime from the standpoint of functionalist (Durkheimian) theory and surveys the FBI''s image in popular entertainment from the thirties to the recent "Today''s FBI" as a vicarious ritual of national soliu00addarity to explain the popularity of the action detective formula. Soundly based on extensive research and interviews, the book prou00advides an account of how the FBI and the mass entertainment indusu00adtry were able to transform the bureau and its biggest cases into popular mythology. Hoover and his FBI became national heroes through identifiu00adcation with the action detective hero of crime entertainment. Hoover''s popular culture role made him and his bureau sacrosanct symbols of national pride and unity, but in turn made it very diffiu00adcult for them to do anything that would not conform to the public''s preconceptions about action heroes. Powers shows that the dyu00adnamics of popular culture are integral to an explanation of the collapse of the bureau''s reputation following Hoover''s death. Had Hoover and the popularizers of the FBI not attempted to turn the popular culture G-Man into an embodiment of traditional Ameriu00adcan virtues, the illegal activities that came to light following Hoover''s death would have been excused as inconsequential in the larger context of a hard-boiled "War on the Underworld." G-Men examines a classic case of the manipulation of popular culture for political power. Seldom in American culture has such manipulation been so successful. As Powers states: "At the same time Hoover was casting his shadow over American public life his G-Men were the stars of movies, radio adventures, comics, pulp magazines, television series, even bubble gum cards." But he finds that Hoover--far from controlling his own destiny and the power of the agency he had built--was created, shaped, and then destroyed by the dynamics of popular culture and the public expectations it generated.