Bücher von Richard Powers

A playful and provocative novel about the discovery of the happiness gene.

From Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author of The Overstory, Richard Powers's 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.Gain's stunning conclusion reveals the countless invisible connections between the largest enterprises and the smallest lives.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Powers's Plowing the Dark recasts the rules of the novel and remains one his most daring works--a mesmerizing fiction explores the imagination's power to both destroy and save. 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. "Mention Richard Powers' name to other writers and see them get that faraway look in their eyes: They are calculating the eventual reach of his influence."-Sven Birkerts, Esquire

"Dazzling and audacious. . . Nothing short of astounding." --Philadelphia InquirerThe critically acclaimed debut novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory and the forthcoming Bewilderment."A writer of blistering intellect . . . [Powers is] a novelist of ideas and a novelist of witness, and in both respects, he has few American peers." -- Richard Eder, Los Angeles TimesIn 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 offer the reader a glimpse into a mystery that spans a century of brutality and progress.

»Die Wurzeln des Lebens« ist ein großer epischer Roman, der unseren Platz in der Welt neu vermisst - ausgezeichnet mit dem Pulitzer Preis 2019 für LiteraturIn Richard Powers Erzählwelt ist alles miteinander verknüpft. Die Menschen sind miteinander verwurzelt wie ein Wald. Sie bilden eine Familie aus Freunden, die sich zum Schutz der Bäume zusammenfinden: der Sohn von Siedlern, die unter dem letzten der ausgestorbenen Kastanienbäume Amerikas lebten; eine junge Frau, deren Vater aus China eine Maulbeere mitbrachte; ein Soldat, der im freien Fall von einem Feigenbaum aufgefangen wurde; und die unvergessliche Patricia Westerford, die als Botanikerin die Kommunikation der Bäume entdeckte. Sie alle tun sich zusammen, um die ältesten Mammutbäume zu retten - und geraten in eine Spirale von Politik und Gewalt, die nicht nur ihr Leben, sondern auch unsere Welt bedroht.»Wäre Powers ein amerikanischer Autor des 19. Jahrhunderts, welcher wäre er? Wahrscheinlich Herman Melville mit >Moby DickMargaret Atwood

Richard Powers arbeitete als Programmierer in den Docks von Boston. Während der Nachtschicht las er Thomas Manns »Zauberberg«. Als er im Museum die berühmte Fotografie des Kölner August Sanders von drei jungen Männer aus dem Jahr 1914 entdeckt, denkt er, dem Jahrhundert in die Augen zu schauen. Der Erzähler Richard Powers war geboren.Der Held in Powers Geschichte ist ebenso von Sanders Fotografie in Bann gezogen. Fieberhaft recherchiert er die Hintergründe der Bildes, bis die drei Bauern aus dem Westerwald ihre Lebensgeschichten erzählen: vom Verschwinden und vom Überleben im Ersten Weltkrieg, und von der fast unmöglichen Wende zum Glück, als sich der Weg des einen mit der Biographie von Henry Ford, dem großen Erfinder und Autobauer, kreuzt.

"Dazzling...a cerebral thriller that's both intellectually engaging and emotionally compelling, a lively tour de force."-Michiko Kakutani, The New York TimesAfter four novels and several years 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 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 more worldly, until it demands to know its own name, sex, race, and reason for existing.

Jonah, Joseph and Ruth are the children of mixed-race parents determined to protect them from the grinding effects of race. Hothouse children, they are all musically talented, but they cannot be protected from the world for long.