“Powers pens a musical marvel,” a review of Orfeo by Julienne Isaacs, Winnipeg Free Press, January 25, 2014. Powers is no ordinary novelist, and Orfeo is no ordinary novel. Like the haunting music it describes, it is stirring and odd, elegant and melancholy, the kind of book you can’t shake even if you dislike it. … Orfeo mainly strikes, Read More

“The Bioterrorist Who Loved Mahler,” a review of Orfeo by Ron Hogan, The Daily Beast, January 25, 2014. The interweaving obsessions with classical music and genetics recall Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations … [but] Orfeo never feels like a retread of The Gold Bug Variations. The new novel is more densely packed, more intimate—and perhaps, for many readers, more inviting.

“Mood music: A master novelist mixes music and technology,” a review of Orfeo by Emily Bobrow, The Economist January 25, 2014. Music guides this lyrical novel, much of which tells the story of Peter Els in retrospect. … At first “Orfeo” seems like a timely story of governmental overreach—of security-related scare tactics and civil-liberties breached. But soon it, Read More

A review of Orfeo, by  Adam Kirsch, Boston Globe, January 25, 2014. Not until the novel’s last pages do biology and music, past and present, come together in a clever, explosive resolution…. It is Powers’s earnest concern with what it means to be an artist and his interrogation of the price we pay for art, that sustains, Read More

A review of Orfeus by Bob Hoover, Dallas Morning News, January 25, 2014. Along with his keen interest in scientific advances, Powers is concerned with the flaws in human beings…. [Els] is both rejected and rejecting, loved and unloving, his motivations tough to figure until he’s ready to face a different kind of music at last. Then,, Read More

Orfeo makes SF Chronicle’s Recommended list, Sunday, January 26.  “…one of his finest yet.”

“A Musical Unibomber?,” review of Orfeo by Charles R. Larson, CounterPunch, Weekend Edition January 24-26, 2014. Orfeo is an elegant book, filled with vast swaths of music theory, the obsessional undertakings of a man who gave his heart and soul to pushing music into new dimensions…. [A]nother major novel of the new year.

Orfeo makes Pegasus Books recommended list for January 2014.  “This extraordinarily beautiful and moving story of a man’s search for redemption is at once a history of the avant-garde in America and an inspired meditation on the power of music.”

“Richard Powers: A Musical Theory of Everything,” an audio interview with Christopher Lydon for Radio Open Source, January 23, 2014. Richard Powers is indulging us in a runaway riff on music, in a little room in the Boston Athenaeum, on the top of Beacon Hill, overlooking the Old Granary Burying Ground, after a marvelous reading, Read More

Tom LeClair’s in-depth review of Orfeo, written for Barnes & Noble, has been picked up by the Christian Science Monitor for its January 23, 2014 edition. “Orfeo: A retired music professor on the run from the government confronts his past in Richard Powers’s profound yet accessible 11th novel.” Of novelists in Powers’s generation with whom he is often compared, Read More

The Week Magazine chose Orfeo as its Novel of the Week, January 22, 2014.

A review of Orfeo, by James Costa, Three Guys One Book, January 22, 2014. The year has just begun and Richard Powers’s stunning new novel Orfeo will certainly end up on my top ten list.