Richard Powers
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
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,...
Author
Publisher
W.W. Norton & Company
Pub. Date
[2014]
Edition
First Edition.
Physical Desc
369 pages ; 25 cm
Language
English
Description
Composer Peter Els --the "Bioterrorist Bach" -- pays a final visit to the people he loves, those who shaped his musical journey and, through the help of his ex-wife, his daughter, and his longtime collaborator, he hatches a plan to turn his disastrous collision with Homeland Security into a work of art that will reawaken its audience to the sounds all around them.
Author
Pub. Date
2006
Edition
1st ed.
Physical Desc
451 pages ; 24 cm
Language
English
Description
On a remote Nebraska road, 27-year-old Mark Schluter flips his truck in a near-fatal accident. His older sister Karin returns reluctantly to their hometown to nurse Mark back from a traumatic head injury. When he emerges from a protracted coma, Mark believes that this woman--who looks, acts, and sounds just like his sister--is really an identical impostor. Shattered by her brother's refusal to recognize her, Karin contacts the cognitive neurologist...
Author
Pub. Date
1985
Edition
1st ed.
Physical Desc
352 pages ; 25 cm
Language
English
Description
"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....
Author
Pub. Date
1994
Edition
1st HarperPerennial ed.
Physical Desc
352 pages ; 21 cm
Language
English
Description
In the pediatric ward of a public hospital in the heart of Los Angeles, a group of sick children is gathering. Surrogate parents to this band of stray kids, resident Richard Kraft and therapist Linda Espera are charged with keeping the group alive on make-believe alone. Determined to give hope where there is none, the adults spin a desperate anthology of stories that promise restoration and escape. However, the inevitable is foreshadowed in the faces...
Author
Publisher
W. W. Norton & Company
Pub. Date
[2021]
Edition
First edition.
Physical Desc
278 pages ; 24 cm
Language
English
Description
"The astrobiologist Theo Byrne searches for life throughout the cosmos while single-handedly raising his unusual nine-year-old, Robin, following the death of his wife. Robin is a warm, kind boy who spends hours painting elaborate pictures of endangered animals. He's also about to be expelled from third grade for smashing his friend in the face. As his son grows more troubled, Theo hopes to keep him off psychoactive drugs. He learns of an experimental...
7) Galatea 2.2
Author
Pub. Date
1996
Edition
1st HarperPerennial ed.
Physical Desc
329 pages ; 21 cm
Language
English
Description
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...
Author
Pub. Date
2000
Edition
1st ed.
Physical Desc
415 pages ; 24 cm
Language
English
Description
In a digital laboratory on the shores of Puget Sound, a band of virtual reality researchers race 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 two such remote places? Only the shared imagination, a room that these people unwittingly build in common,...
Author
Publisher
Blackstone Publishing
Pub. Date
2014
Edition
Unabridged
Language
English
Description
When the Internet suddenly stops working, society reels from the loss of flowing data, instant messages, and streaming entertainment. Addicts wander the streets, talking to themselves in 140 characters or less and forcing cats to perform tricks for their amusement, while the truly desperate pin their requests for casual encounters on public bulletin boards. The economy tumbles further and the government passes the draconian NET Recovery Act.
For
...12) Bottomland
Author
Language
English
Description
"Follows the German-American Hess family during the volatile, unstable years after World War I as they attempt to overcome the xenophobic sentiment that threatens their safety. Though Jon Julius and his wife Margrit have been settled on their midwestern land for over twenty years, their German heritage and dual loyalties are looked upon by neighbors with great suspicion and alarm. When the youngest two daughters vanish in the middle of the night,...