About the Author

RICHARD POWERS is the author of twelve novels, most recently The Overstory, which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, as well as The Echo Maker, which won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Powers has received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Historical Fiction, and is a four-time National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. He lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.

Reviews

Powers is nothing if not amazingly inventive. In his new work, virtual-reality researchers are constructing an empty white room near Puget Sound that could become just about anything, while half a world away, in another white room near the Mediterranean, a hostage is held by Islamic fundamentalists. Yes, these stories do intersect. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

A groundbreaking literary novelist and MacArthur "genius" grant winner, Powers (Galatea 2.2; Gain; The Gold Bug Variations) takes on virtual reality, global migration, prolonged heartbreak, the end of the Cold War and the nature and purpose of art in his ambitious and dazzling seventh book. Like most of Powers's previous works, this novel weaves together two sets of characters. One comprises artists and programmers at the Cavern, a pioneering virtual-reality project sponsored by a Microsoftesque company. As college students in the early 1970s, painter Adie Klarpol, writer Steve Spiegel and composer Ted Zimmerman shared a house, an art scene, a complex erotic entanglement and a sense of limitless potential. When the novel opens, it's the mid-'80s, and Steve is a programmer: he convinces Adie to flee New York City and commercial art for Washington State and the Cavern. We follow Adie as she learns about new media and about her new, multiethnic colleagues, each with his or her own emotional problems. As Adie and Steve rediscover high art and each other, both must return to the charismatic Ted and his painful fate. Powers's other plot concerns Taimur Martin, an American teacher taken hostage in Beirut. Taimur spends most of the novel in captivity, thrown back on memory and imagination: his harrowing second-person narration transforms outward monotony into inward drama, building up to some of Powers's best writing to date. Powers's fans love his gorgeous, allusive (if sometimes florid) prose, and his digressions into the sciences; both features, largely missing from Gain, re-emerge here to spectacular effect. Taimur's life and Adie's link up only thematically--they never meet; instead, Powers's dramatic prose and his intellectual reach makes their symbolic connection more than enough to propel the novel toward its moving close. (June) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

"Superb...Powers pulls off one of the most astonishing feats I've ever seen in literature...daring, unpredictable, and emotionally powerful."--Steven Moore, The Washington Post Book World"A fiercely visual book...the effect is spectacular...The most visceral prose Powers has ever written."--Daniel Zalewski, The New York Times Book Review"America's most ambitious novelist...Plowing The Dark is virtual reality composed in a language that will never go obsolete. No one who becomes immersed in its poetry will walk out the way he or she came in."--Kevin Berger, The San Francisco Chronicle Book Review"Plowing The Dark may be [Powers's] most finely executed story yet...Relentless and mesmerizing...a beautiful homage to the sine qua non of consciousness itself...the final triumph of art over pain."--Gail Caldwell, The Boston Globe"Powers has an inventive, virtuosic writing style that reserves him a special category in today's fiction...I don't have the space to do justice to all the wonders of craftsmanship in Plowing The Dark...This is the first emblematic novel of the 21st century, a lesson and an inspiration."--Judy Doenges, The Seattle Times"[A] tour de force. It has overwhelming inventiveness and fun moments as well."--Donald Newlove, The Philadelphia Inquirer"This is, ultimately, a novel of ideas, but one with a soul...There is much to admire in this novel, particularly the ingenious way in which reality is captured."--Scott Leibs, The San Diego Union-Tribune"Full of intelligence, exacting analysis and supple prose...[a] magisterial storybook."--Corey Mesler, The Commercial Appeal"Powers' twin tales are rife with echoes and allusions that reinforce their shared concern with the ways in which we reinvent our worlds."--Ralph Rugoff, LA Weekly"Superb...perhaps [Powers'] greatest novel...Nearly every page of Powers' astonishing book has stunning ideas that will force you to re-evaluate everything you thought you knew about these subjects, and the implications you never imagined."--Steven Moore, The Newark Star-Ledger"Powers displays his trademark intellectual richness...His prose makes technology sing and music compute."--Michael Harris, The Los Angeles Times