Bøger af Richard Powers

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory, an intense, thrilling novel about a near fatal accident and its devastating consequences. On a winter night, Mark Schluter's truck turns over in a near-fatal accident.

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

PLAYGROUND follows four lives âEUR" a marine biologist, an artist, a schoolteacher, and an AI pioneer âEUR" that intersect on an island in French Polynesia when it is chosen as a base for seasteading, humanityâEUR(TM)s next great adventure. Powers is the author of the bestselling Pulitzer Prize-winning novel THE OVERSTORY and the Booker-shortlisted BEWILDERMENT. Praise for Richard Powers:'Powers has extraordinary gifts as a writer' GUARDIAN'Impressively precise in its scientific conjectures, Bewilderment is no less rich or wise in its emotionality' OBSERVER'He composes some of the most beautiful sentences I've ever read. I'm in awe of his talent' OPRAH WINFREY'It is impossible to deny the importance of Powers's message' SUNDAY TIMES'Refreshing, original and moving' EVENING STANDARD

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.

'Part of the joy of reading Powers over the years has been his capacity for revelation' Colson WhiteheadOn the west coast of America, virtual reality researchers race to complete the Cavern, a plain white room that can become a jungle, a painting or a vast Byzantine cathedral. Adie Klarpol, a disillusioned artist, is fascinated by this cutting-edge technology.In a war-torn city on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, an American teacher - Taimur Martin - is held hostage, chained to a radiator in an empty white room.What can possibly join two such remote places? Only the shared imagination, a room that these two people unwittingly build in common...'Spectacular... Riveting' New York Times

THE MILLION-COPY GLOBAL BESTSELLER AND WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION'Radical and exciting' Jessie Burton'Breathtaking' Barbara Kingsolver'It changed how I thought about the Earth and our place in it' Barack Obama'Really, just one of the best novels, period' Ann PatchettA wondrous, exhilarating novel about nine strangers brought together by an unfolding natural catastrophe. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. An Air Force crewmember in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. This is the story of these and five other strangers, each summoned in different ways by the natural world, who are brought together in a last stand to save it from catastrophe.

Read this thrilling and timely novel of the human soul from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory.After many years of living abroad, a young writer returns to the United States to take up a position at his former college. There he encounters Philip Lentz, an outspoken neurologist intent on using computers to model the human brain.Lentz involves the writer in an outlandish and irresistible project - to train a computing system by reading a canonical list of Great Books. Through repeated tutorials, the machine grows gradually more worldly, until it demands to know its own age, sex, race and reason for existing.'An ingenious, ambitious, at times dizzily cerebral work... It soars and spins... The novel attains an aching, melancholy beauty' New York Times

'Penetrating and splendidly written... Dazzling' New York TimesIn Lacewood, Illinois, Laura Bodey, a divorced mother of two and real estate agent, plunges into a new existence when she learns that she has cancer.This same small town is home to Clare & Company, a soap manufacturer begun by three brothers in nineteenth-century Boston. Over the course of more than a century, it transforms into a powerful international corporation.Clare & Company's stunning growth reflects America's kaleidoscopic history, yet for Laura and her family, this wild success has profound and lasting consequences.

'A psychological thriller, a flawed love story, a study of authenticity in emotions, a commentary on America's relations with itself and the world, humanity and ecology... undoubtedly magnificent' The TimesOn a winter night, Mark Schluter's truck turns over in a near-fatal accident. His sister, Karin, returns reluctantly to their hometown to look after him. But when he finally awakes from his coma, Mark believes that Karin - who looks, acts, and sounds just like his sister - is really an identical impostor.Shattered by her brother's behaviour, Karin contacts neuroscientist Dr Gerald Weber. But what Weber discovers in Mark begins to undermine even his own sense of self. Meanwhile, Mark, armed only with a note left by an anonymous witness, attempts to learn what really happened. The truth of that evening will change the lives of all three beyond recognition.

Four lives are drawn together in a sweeping, panoramic new novel from Richard Powers, showcasing the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory at the height of his skills. Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world's first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up on naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane's work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough.They meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, whose deposits of phosphorus once helped to feed the world. Now the tiny atoll has been chosen for humanity's next adventure: a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out onto the open sea. But first, the island's residents must vote to greenlight the project or turn the seasteaders away.Set in the world's largest ocean, this awe-filled book explores that last wild place we have yet to colonize in a still-unfolding oceanic game, and interweaves beautiful writing, rich characterization, profound themes of technology and the environment, and a deep exploration of our shared humanity in a way only Richard Powers can.

Four lives are drawn together in a sweeping, panoramic new novel from Richard Powers, showcasing the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory at the height of his skills. Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world's first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up on naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago school bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane's work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough.They meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, whose deposits of phosphorus once helped to feed the world. Now the tiny atoll has been chosen for humanity's next adventure: a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out onto the open sea. But first, the island's residents must vote to greenlight the project or turn the seasteaders away.Set in the world's largest ocean, this awe-filled book explores that last wild place we have yet to colonise in a still-unfolding oceanic game and interweaves beautiful writing, rich characterisation, profound themes of technology and the environment and a deep exploration of our shared humanity in a way only Richard Powers can.

LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2024A POWERFUL NEW NOVEL FROM THE PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING AND BOOKER-SHORTLISTED AUTHOR OF THE OVERSTORY AND BEWILDERMENT'Is there anything Richard Powers cannot write? The world here is complete, seductive, and promising. The writing feels like the ocean. Vast, mysterious, deep and alive' PERCIVAL EVERETT'An extraordinarily immersive journey through lives linked in mysterious ways - gripping, alarming and uplifting' EMMA DONOGHUERafi and Todd are two polar opposites at an elite high school where they bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game. It sets them up for life: Rafi will get lost in literature, while Todd's work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough.Elsewhere, Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world's first aqualungs; Ina Aroita grows up in naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home.All of these people meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, marked for humanity's next great adventure: a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out into the open sea. As the seasteaders close in, how will Evie play the ever-unfolding oceanic game? Will Ina engage in acts of destruction? Todd and Rafi, now estranged, still find themselves in competition: Todd unravels while working on an idea to redraw the boundaries of human immortality, while Rafi and the residents must decide if they will greenlight the new project on their shores and change their home forever.Set in the world's largest ocean, Playground explores that last wild place we have yet to colonize and interweaves profound themes of technology and the environment, and a deep exploration of our shared humanity in a way only Richard Powers can.'Powers is a master of taking important topics of our times - from threats to our oceans and climate change to AI - and turning them into riveting and fiercely relevant books imbued with psychological insight and a deep awe for nature. This eloquent dance of the scientific and emotional makes him one of our finest story tellers. PLAYGROUND is brilliant, captivating and important - and the best book I've read this year' ANDREA WULFMore praise for Richard Powers:'Powers has extraordinary gifts as a writer' GUARDIAN'Impressively precise in its scientific conjectures, Bewilderment is no less rich or wise in its emotionality' OBSERVER'He composes some of the most beautiful sentences I've ever read. I'm in awe of his talent' OPRAH WINFREY'It is impossible to deny the importance of Powers's message' SUNDAY TIMES'Refreshing, original and moving' EVENING STANDARD

"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.

An Air Force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. These four, and five other strangers, each summoned in different ways by trees, are brought together in a last and violent stand to save the continent's few remaining acres of virgin forest.

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.

In a digital laboratory on the shores of Puget Sound, virtual reality researchers race to complete the Cavern, a bland white room that can become a jungle, a painting, or a vast Byzantine cathedral. In a war-torn city on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, an American is held hostage, chained to a radiator in an empty white room...

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 PostStuart Ressler, a brilliant young molecular biologist, sets out in 1957 to crack the genetic code. His efforts are sidetracked by other, more intractable codes?social, moral, musical, spiritual?and he falls in love with a member of his research team. Years later, another young man and woman team up to investigate a different scientific mystery: Why did the eminently promising Ressler suddenly disappear from the world of science? Strand by strand, these two love stories twist about each other in a double helix of desire. The critically acclaimed third novel from Pulitzer Prize?winning author Richard Powers, The Gold Bug Variations is an intellectual tour-de-force that probes the meaning of love, science, music, and art.

"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.