Richard Powers Popular Books
Richard Powers Biography & Facts
Richard Powers (born June 18, 1957) is an American novelist whose works explore the effects of modern science and technology. His novel The Echo Maker won the 2006 National Book Award for Fiction. He has also won many other awards over the course of his career, including a MacArthur Fellowship. As of 2023, Powers has published thirteen novels and has taught at the University of Illinois and Stanford University. He won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Overstory. Life and work Early life One of five children, Powers was born in Evanston, Illinois. His family later moved a few miles west to Lincolnwood, where his father was a local school principal. When Powers was 11, they moved to Bangkok, Thailand, where his father had accepted a position at International School Bangkok, which Powers attended through his freshman year, ending in 1972. During that time outside the U.S., he developed skills in vocal music and proficiency in cello, guitar, saxophone, and clarinet. He also became an avid reader, enjoying nonfiction primarily and classics such as the Iliad and the Odyssey. The family returned to the U.S. when Powers was 16. Following graduation in 1975 from DeKalb High School in DeKalb, Illinois, he enrolled at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (UIUC) with a major in physics, which he switched to English literature during his first semester. He earned a BA in 1978 and an MA in Literature in 1980. He decided not to pursue a PhD partly because of his aversion to strict specialization, which had been one reason for his early transfer from physics to English, and partially because he had observed in graduate students and their professors a lack of pleasure in reading and writing (as portrayed in Galatea 2.2). Professorships and awards In 2010 and 2013, Powers was a Stein Visiting Writer at Stanford University, during which time he partly assisted in the lab of biochemist Aaron Straight.Powers was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1989. He received a Lannan Literary Award in 1999. Powers was appointed the Swanlund Professor of English at UIUC in 1996, where he is currently an emeritus professor.On August 22, 2013, Stanford University announced that Powers had been named the Phil and Penny Knight Professor of Creative Writing in the Department of English. Novels Powers learned computer programming at Illinois as a user of PLATO and moved to Boston to work as a programmer. One Saturday in 1980, Powers saw the 1914 photograph "Young Farmers" by August Sander at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and was so inspired that he quit his job two days later to write a novel about the people in the photograph. Powers spent the next two years writing the book, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, which was published by William Morrow in 1985. It comprises three alternating threads: a novella featuring the three young men in the photo during World War I, a technology magazine editor who is obsessed with the photo, and the author's critical and historical musings about the mechanics of photography and the life of Henry Ford. It was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, and received Rosenthal Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. It also received a Special Citation from PEN Hemingway Awards.Powers moved to the Netherlands, where he wrote Prisoner's Dilemma about The Walt Disney Company and nuclear warfare. He followed with The Gold Bug Variations about genetics, music, and computer science. It was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist.In 1993, Powers wrote Operation Wandering Soul about an agonized young pediatrician. It was a finalist for the National Book Award.In 1995, Powers published the Pygmalion story Galatea 2.2 about an artificial intelligence experiment gone awry. It was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist.In 1998, Powers wrote Gain about a 150-year-old chemical company and a woman who lives near one of its plants and succumbs to ovarian cancer. It won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction in 1999. 2000's Plowing the Dark tells of a Seattle research team building a groundbreaking virtual reality while an American teacher is held hostage in Beirut. It received Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award Prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Powers wrote The Time of Our Singing in 2003. It is about the musician children of an interracial couple who met at Marian Anderson's famed 1939 concert on the Lincoln Memorial steps. Powers's ninth novel, 2006's The Echo Maker, is about a Nebraska man who suffers head trauma in a truck accident and believes his caregiver sister is an imposter. It won a National Book Award and was a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist.Powers's tenth novel, 2009's Generosity: An Enhancement, has writing professor Russell Stone encountering his former student, Thassa, an Algerian woman whose constant happiness is exploited by journalists and scientists. In 2014, Powers wrote Orfeo about Peter Els, a retired music composition instructor and avant-garde composer who is mistaken for a bio-terrorist after being discovered with a makeshift genetics lab in his house. The Overstory, published in April 2018, is about nine Americans whose unique life experiences with trees bring them together to address the destruction of forests. It won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the $75,000 2019 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and was runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.Bewilderment, published in September 2021, was shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize and longlisted for the National Book Award and Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. It is described as "an astrobiologist thinks of a creative way to help his rare and troubled son in Richard Powers’ deeply moving and brilliantly original novel." Bibliography 1985 Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, HarperCollins ISBN 0-688-04201-5 1988 Prisoner's Dilemma, McGraw Hill ISBN 0-07-050612-4 1991 The Gold Bug Variations, William Morrow ISBN 0-688-09891-6 1993 Operation Wandering Soul, HarperCollins ISBN 0-688-11548-9 1995 Galatea 2.2, Farrar Straus & Giroux ISBN 0-374-19948-5 1998 Gain, Farrar Straus & Giroux ISBN 0-312-20409-4 2000 Plowing the Dark, Farrar, Straus & Giroux ISBN 0-374-23461-2 2003 The Time of Our Singing, Farrar, Straus & Giroux ISBN 0-374-27782-6 2006 The Echo Maker, Farrar, Straus & Giroux ISBN 0-374-14635-7 2009 Generosity: An Enhancement, Farrar, Straus & Giroux ISBN 0-374-16114-3 2014 Orfeo, W. W. Norton & Company ISBN 978-0-393-24082-5 2018 The Overstory, W. W. Norton & Company ISBN 978-0-393-63552-2 2021 Bewilderment, W. W. Norton & Company ISBN 978-0-393-88114-1 2024 PlaygroundAwards and recognition References External links Official website Richard Powers, Professor of English at UIUC Archived official website with extensive bibliography Kevin Berger (2002). "Richard Powers, The Art of Fiction.... Discover the Richard Powers popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Richard Powers books.
Best Seller Richard Powers Books of 2024
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Lessons
Ian McEwanNEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER A NEW YORKER ESSENTIAL READ From the bestselling author of Atonement and Saturday comes the epic and intimate story of one man's life across ...
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First in Line
Kate Andersen Brower“An intimate, compulsively readable account of the dynamics that have shapedand sometimes destroyedrelations at the top of the American political hierarchy.... [and] a valuabl...
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Perestroika in Paris
Jane SmileyNATIONAL BESTSELLER From the Pulitzer Prizewinning and bestselling author: a captivating, brilliantly imaginative story of three extraordinary animalsand a young boywhose liv...
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The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner
Friedrich NietzscheTwo representative and important works in one volume by one of the greatest German philosophers.The Birth of Tragedy (1872) was Nietzsche's first book. Its youthful faults were exp...
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Bold
Peter H. Diamandis & Steven Kotler“A visionary roadmap for people who believe they can change the worldand invaluable advice about bringing together the partners and technologies to help them do it.” President Bill...
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Siege of Stone
Terry Goodkindio9's New SciFi and Fantasy Books You Need to Put On Your Radar Set in the world of the Sword of Truth saga, the ramifications of New York Times bestseller Terry Goodkind's Shroud ...
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Operation White Rabbit
Dennis McDougalA search for the truth behind the DEA’s life imprisonment of acid's most famous martyr. Operation White Rabbit traces the rise and falland rise and fall againof the psychedel...
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Tattoos on the Heart
Gregory Boyle“Destined to become a classic of both urban reportage and contemporary spirituality” (Los Angeles Times)Tattoos on the Heart is a series of parables about kinship and redemption fr...
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The Virgin Elizabeth
Robin MaxwellNow available again, the third book in Robin Maxwell's acclaimed Elizabethan quartet, a Los Angeles Times bestseller called "Tense, absorbing, highly enter...
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Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance
Richard Powers“Dazzling and audacious. . . Nothing short of astounding.” Philadelphia InquirerThe critically acclaimed debut novel from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Overstory and the...
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Nixon and Kissinger
Robert DallekIn this epic dual biography, one of our most distinguished scholarsthe bestselling author of An Unfinished Lifeprobes the lives and times of two unlikely leaders whose partnership ...
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Shroud of Eternity
Terry GoodkindShroud of Eternity picks up where Terry Goodkind’s New York Times bestseller Death’s Mistress left off, promising a thrilling brew of bloodshed, sex, deception, and sorcery.The for...
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Goliath
Matt Stoller“Every thinking American must read” (The Washington Book Review) this startling and “insightful” (The New York Times) look at how concentrated financial power and consumerism has t...
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Destiny and Power
Jon Meacham#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER In this brilliant biography, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jon Meacham chronicles the life of George Herbert Walker Bush.NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BES...
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A Prophet with Honor
William C. MartinA Prophet with Honor is the biography Billy Graham himself invited and appreciated for its sympathetic but frank approach. Carefully documented, eminently fair, and gracefully writ...
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Velocity
Ajaz Ahmed & Stefan OlanderHow can you win when the only certainty is change? Highly accessible, lively and inspiring, Velocity draws upon the authors’ unique perspectives and experiences to present seven ti...
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The Price of Silence
William D. CohanA Duke alumnus whose work has been hailed as “authoritative” (The Washington Post), “seductively engrossing” (Chicago Tribune), “riveting” (The Economist), and “masterful” (Los Ang...
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Humiliation
Wayne KoestenbaumWayne Koestenbaum considers the meaning of humiliation in this eloquent work of cultural critique and personal reflection.The lives of people both famous and obscure are filled wit...
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21 Secrets of Million-Dollar Sellers
Stephen J. HarvillFortune 50 consultant Stephen Harvill reveals the secrets of the world’s best salespeople who earn at least one million dollars a year in “the only sales book most superstar hopefu...
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Lysistrata and Other Plays
Aristophanes & Alan H. SommersteinThe Acharnians/The Clouds/Lysistrata'We women have the salvation of Greece in our hands'Writing at a time of political and social crisis in Athens, the ancient Greek comic playwrig...
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A Visit from the Goon Squad
Jennifer EganNATIONAL BESTSELLER NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE WINNER With music pulsing on every page, this startling, exhilarating novel of selfdestruction and redemption "fea...
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Station Eleven
Emily St. John MandelNATIONAL BESTSELLER NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST A PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FINALIST Set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapsethe spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, h...
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The Whole Language
Gregory BoyleGregory Boyle, the beloved Jesuit priest and author of the inspirational bestsellers Tattoos on the Heart and Barking to the Choir, returns with a call to witness the transformativ...
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Lincoln
Richard CarwardineAs a defender of national unity, a leader in war, and the emancipator of slaves, Abraham Lincoln lays ample claim to being the greatest of our presidents. But the story of his rise...
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Shrines of Gaiety
Kate AtkinsonNEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The awardwinning author of Life after Life transports us to a restless London in the wake of the Great Wara city bursting with money, glamour, and corrup...
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Barking to the Choir
Gregory BoyleIn a moving example of unconditional love in difficult times, Gregory Boyle, the Jesuit priest and New York Times bestselling author of Tattoos on the Heart, shares what working w...
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Hindu Myths
Wendy DonigerRecorded in sacred Sanskrit texts, including the Rig Veda and the Mahabharata, Hindu Myths are thought to date back as far as the tenth century BCE. Here in these seventyfive semin...
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The Friendly Orange Glow
Brian DearAt a time when Steve Jobs was only a teenager and Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t even born, a group of visionary engineers and designerssome of them only high school studentsin the late 19...
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The Garden of Lost and Found
Harriet EvansDon't miss the STUNNING new novel from Sunday Times bestselling author, Harriet Evans THE BELOVED GIRLS is available to buy now!'Spellbinding' Independent'My top book of 2019' DI...
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The History of the Church from Christ to Constantine
Eusebius, Andrew Louth & G. WilliamsonEusebius's account is the only surviving historical record of the Church during its crucial first 300 years. Bishop Eusebius, a learned scholar who lived most of his life in Caesar...
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Energy
Richard RhodesA “meticulously researched” (The New York Times Book Review) examination of energy transitions over time and an exploration of the current challenges presented by global warming, a...
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Firestarter
Stephen KingMaster storyteller Stephen King presents the classic #1 New York Times bestsellernow a major motion picture!Andy McGee and Vicky Tomlinson were once college students looking to mak...
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The White Queen
Philippa GregoryThe inspiration for the critically acclaimed Starz miniseries The White Queen, #1 New York Times bestselling author Philippa Gregory brings to life the extraordinary story of Eliza...
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A Self-Made Man
Sidney BlumenthalThe first in a sweeping, multivolume history of Abraham Lincolnfrom his obscure beginnings to his presidency, death, and the overthrow of his postCivil War plan of reconciliation“e...
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Be More Pirate
Sam Conniff AllendePirates didn’t just break the rules, they rewrote them. They didn’t just reject society, they reinvented it. Pirates didn’t just challenge the statusquo, they changed everyfckingth...
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The Arrogance of Power
Anthony SummersThe controversial New York Times–bestselling biography of America’s most infamous president written by a master of investigative political reporting. Anthony Summers’s tower...
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Heart of Black Ice
Terry GoodkindHeart of Black Ice is the climactic conclusion to Terry Goodkind's New York Times bestselling Nicci Chronicles.In the wake of the brutal war that swept the Old World in Siege of St...
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All the Powers of Earth
Sidney BlumenthalLincoln’s incredible ascent to power in a world of chaos is newly revealed in this “compelling, original, and elegantly written” (Michael Beschloss, New York Times bestselling auth...
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King Richard
Michael DobbsONE OF USA TODAY'S BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR A riveting account of the crucial days, hours, and moments when the Watergate conspiracy consumed, and ultimately toppled, a presidentfro...
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The Gay Science
Friedrich Nietzsche & Walter KaufmannThe book Nietzsche called "the most personal of all my books." It was here that he first proclaimed the death of Godto which a large part of the book is devotedand his doctrin...
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King
Ben KaneThe thrilling adventure story about history's greatest warrior: Richard the Lionheart Autumn 1192. At the end of the Third Crusade Jerusalem remains in the Saracens' hands, and a p...