“Polyphony beyond the Human: Animals, Music, and Community in Coetzee and Powers,” by Ben de Bruyn, Studies in the Novel, Volume 48, Number 3, Fall 2016 (pp. 364-383). Taking issue with the anthropocentric assumptions behind classic and recent work on sound in the novel, this paper draws attention to animal vocalizations in the writings, Read More

Ann Keniston examines Richard Powers’s novel The Echo Maker and Jess Walters’s The Zero in her article “Traumatic Brain Injury in Post-9/11 Fiction,” Post45, October 24, 2015.

 The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment, by David T. Mitchell with Sharon L. Snyder (University of Michigan Press, 2015). Theorizing the role of disabled subjects in global consumer culture and the emergence of alternative crip/queer subjectivities in film, fiction, media, and art. In the neoliberal era, when human worth is measured by its relative utility, Read More

“The Desert Island Reading List,” by Gregg Sangillo, American University, June 11, 2014. In this article, American University literature department faculty members were asked to name their all-time favorite works of fiction.  Professor Richard Sha chose The Echo Maker, describing it as “a stunning novel: beautifully written, brilliant, and a page-turner.” He goes on to say that “only a, Read More

Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect, by Heather Houser (Columbia University Press, 2014). Explores environmental crisis and the sick body in works by David Foster Wallace, Richard Powers, Leslie Marmon Silko, Marge Piercy, Jan Zita Grover, and David Wojnarowicz.

Richard Powers with Brad Leithauser.  Lannan Foundation podcast recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on November 14, 2007, after the publication of The Echo Maker. 

Margaret Atwood’s review of Echo Maker appeared in The New York Review of Books, December 21, 2006. “If Powers were an American writer of the nineteenth century, which writer would he be? He’d probably be the Herman Melville of Moby-Dick. His picture is that big…The Echo Maker is a grand novel—grand in its reach, grand in its themes, grand, Read More

Terry Gross interviews Richard Powers for Fresh Air on NPR, December 12, 2006, after he won the National Book Award for The Echo Maker.

The Genius in the Cornfield,” an interview by Stephan J. Lyons for the Chicago Reader, November 2, 2006, after the publication of The Echo Maker.

A review of The Echo Maker, by Colson Whitehead, New York Times, Sunday Book Review, October 22, 2006.

To celebrate both Powers’ literary accomplishments and his contributions to the University of Illinois, the Provost’s Office commissioned production of five short video works, each of which interprets a passage from one of Richard Powers’ five novels.  The videos are a collaborative endeavor between Powers and a group of artists and designers from the, Read More

“Cranes.” Excerpt from novel in progress, in Black Clock number 3 (Spring, 2005). p 1.