Richard Powers

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...

On a winter night on a remote Nebraska road, twenty-seven year old Mark Schluter flips his truck in a near fatal accident. His older sister, Karin, returns to nurse Mark back from a traumatic head injury. But when he emerges from a coma, Mark believes that this woman is really an impostor who looks just like his sister. Shattered, Karin contacts the cognitive neurologist Gerald Weber, who eagerly investigates. What he discovers in Mark slowly undermines...

A 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 emigre scientist, meets Delia Daley, a young Philadelphia Negro studying to be a singer. Their mutual love of music draws them together, and--against all odds and better judgment--they marry. They vow to raise their...

A dazzling new novel by the author of Galatea 2.2 and Gain 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,...

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...

Wie kann eine Familie in einer unberechenbaren Welt überleben, ohne zu zerbrechen? Vater und Sohn allein: Der hochbegabte Robbie mit Asperger-Zügen kann den Tod der Mutter nicht verwinden. In der Schule unverstanden, will er die Mission seiner Mutter vollenden: Er malt Plakate, demonstriert auf den Stufen des Kapitols, um die Natur zu retten. Der verzweifelte junge Vater will ihm mit ungestümer Liebe alles geben. Als Astrobiologe sind ihm die Sterne...

In his new religious thriller, Richard Gid Powers weaves Church intrigue, corporate crime, religious symbols, mystical theology, ancient history and legend into a high stakes struggle for the soul of the Catholic Church. This fast paced adventure sends Ann Carroll, heir to America's greatest Catholic fortune, on a quest to reveal the chilling conspiracy behind the murder of the Church's most saintly bishop. Searching Mt. Athos in Greece, Paris, San...

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.