[PDF] The Gold Bug Variations eBook

Author : Richard Powers
Publisher : HarperCollins
Page : 768 pages
File Size : 17,79 MB
Release : 2021-10-05
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0063119420

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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 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.

Author : Richard Powers
Publisher : Harper Collins
Page : 642 pages
File Size : 25,72 MB
Release : 1992-07-31
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0060975008

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A national bestseller, voted by Time as the #1 novel of 1991, selected as one of the "Best Books of 1991" by Publishers Weekly, and nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award--a magnificent story that probes the meaning of love, science, music, and art, by the brilliant author of Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance.

Author : Richard Powers
Publisher : Macmillan
Page : 340 pages
File Size : 49,30 MB
Release : 2004
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780312423131

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"Dazzling...a cerebral thriller that's both intellectually engaging and emotionally compelling, a lively tour de force."—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times After 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.

Author : Richard Powers
Publisher : Harper Collins
Page : 308 pages
File Size : 13,96 MB
Release : 2014-01-21
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1443422924

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The author of the National Book Award winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist The Echo Maker, Richard Powers “may well be one of the smartest novelists now writing” (LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK REVIEW) Seventy-year-old avant-garde composer Peter Els opens the door one evening to find the police on his doorstep. His home DIY microbiology lab--the latest experiment in his lifelong attempt to extract music from rich patterns beyond the ear’s ability to hear--has come to the attention of Homeland Security. Panicked by the raid on his house, Els turns fugitive, waiting for the evidence to clear him and for the alarm surrounding his activities to blow over. His days in hiding provoke memories of a turbulent century of musical turf wars and cause Els to reflect on a life spent chasing after transcendent sounds to the bewilderment of an indifferent public. As the national hysteria for safety erupts again in the face of this latest threat, Els--the “Bioterrorist Bach”--feeling the noose around him tighten, embarks on a cross-country trip to visit the people in his past who have most shaped his failed musical journey. Through the help of these people--his ex-wife, his daughter and his long-time artistic collaborator-- Els comes up with a plan to turn this disastrous collision with the security state into one last, resonant artwork that might reach an audience beyond his wildest dreams. Inspired by Steve Kurtz, the bio-artist wrongly arrested for terrorism by the FBI, Orfeo probes the boundary between stifling safety and reckless, releasing danger. It explores the varieties of human hunger, in particular the desire to hear more and to make meaning where there is none. Finally, the book is a meditation on that most endangered and priceless of human resources: attention.

Author : Richard Powers
Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
Page : 528 pages
File Size : 23,24 MB
Release : 2001-08-01
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 146680369X

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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

Author : Richard Powers
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Page : 462 pages
File Size : 33,70 MB
Release : 2007-04-01
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0374706549

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Winner of the National Book Award From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Overstory and the Oprah's Book Club selection Bewilderment comes Richard Powers's The Echo Maker, a powerful novel about family and loss. “Wise and elegant . . . The mysteries unfold so organically and stealthily that you are unaware of his machinations until they come to stunning fruition . . . Powers accomplishes something magnificent.” —Colson Whitehead, The New York Times Book Review On a winter night on a remote Nebraska road, twenty-seven-year-old Mark Schluter has a near-fatal car accident. His older sister, Karin, returns reluctantly to their hometown to nurse Mark back from a traumatic head injury. But when Mark emerges from a coma, he believes that this woman—who looks, acts, and sounds just like his sister—is really an imposter. When Karin contacts the famous cognitive neurologist Gerald Weber for help, he diagnoses Mark as having Capgras syndrome. The mysterious nature of the disease, combined with the strange circumstances surrounding Mark’s accident, threatens to change all of their lives beyond recognition. In The Echo Maker, Richard Powers proves himself to be one of our boldest and most entertaining novelists.

Author : Richard Powers
Publisher : HarperCollins
Page : 384 pages
File Size : 26,49 MB
Release : 2021-07-27
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0063119447

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The magnificent second novel from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Overstory and the forthcoming Bewilderment. “Accomplished . . . mature and assured. . . . A major American novelist.”— New Republic Something is wrong with Eddie Hobson, Sr., father of four, sometime history teacher, quiz master, black humorist, and virtuoso invalid. His recurring fainting spells have worsened, and given his ingrained aversion to doctors, his worried family tries to discover the nature of his sickness. Meanwhile, in private, Eddie puts the finishing touches on a secret project he calls Hobbstown, a place that he promises will save him, the world, and everything that’s in it. A dazzling novel of compassion and imagination, Prisoner’s Dilemma is a story of the power of individual experience.

Author : Richard Powers
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Page : 642 pages
File Size : 31,65 MB
Release : 2004-01-01
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0374706417

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“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.

Author : Richard Powers
Publisher : HarperCollins
Page : 446 pages
File Size : 34,94 MB
Release : 2021-06-22
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0063119455

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“Dazzling and audacious. . . Nothing short of astounding.” —Philadelphia Inquirer The 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 Times 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’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.

Author : Richard Powers
Publisher : Harper Collins
Page : 356 pages
File Size : 14,59 MB
Release : 1994-04-08
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780060976118

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Highly imaginative and emotionally powerful, this stunning novel about childhood innocence amid the nightmarish disease and deterioration at the heart of modern Los Angeles was nominated for a National Book Award.