Richard Powers

A novel of activism and natural-world power presents interlocking fables about nine remarkable strangers who are summoned in different ways by trees for an ultimate, brutal stand to save the continent's few remaining acres of virgin forest.

Composer Peter Els opens the door one evening to find the police on his doorstep. His home microbiology lab -- his latest attempt to find music in surprising patterns -- has aroused the suspicions of Homeland Security. Panicked, Els flees. Amid an Internet-fueled hysteria, the "Bioterrorist Bach" pays a final visit to the people he loves. Through their help, Els hatches a plan to turn this disastrous collision with the security state into a work of...

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.

National Bestseller National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Overstory and the forthcoming Bewilderment, a magnificent double love story of two young couples separated by a distance of twenty-five years. “The most lavishly ambitious American novel since Gravity’s Rainbow . . . An outright marvel.” —Washington Post Stuart Ressler, a brilliant young molecular biologist, sets out in 1957 to...

"Dazzling and audacious...Nothing short of astounding." -Philadelphia Inquirer 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’ brilliant and compelling novel. As the fate of the three farmers is chronicled, two contemporary stories unfold....

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...

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...

The epic story of the fastest boat ride in history, on a hand-built dory named the "Emerald Mile," through the heart of the Grand Canyon on the Colorado river.

This dynamic examination traces the lives of two of the most influential figures and their dueling approaches on America's natural landscape. John Muir, the most famous naturalist in American history, protected Yosemite, cofounded the Sierra Club, and is sometimes called the Father of the National Parks. A poor immigrant, self-taught, individualistic, and skeptical of institutions, he had an idealistic belief in the spiritual benefits of holistic...

If You are Thinking of Becoming a Gay Dad, or if You are Already a Gay Dad ─ This Book is for You!

Are you ready to have kids? More and more gay men are turning to adoption and surrogacy to start their own families. An estimated two million American LBGTQ people would like to adopt and an estimated 65,000 adopted children are living with a gay parent. In 2016, The Chicago Tribune reported that 10 to 20 percent

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