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
A review of The Echo Maker, by Colson Whitehead, New York Times, Sunday Book Review, October 22, 2006.
“Magic Powers,” interview by Emma Brockes, focusing on The Time of Our Singing, in The Guardian, March 13, 2003.
“Ebony and Ivory: A Symphony of Race Relations in the Notes of a Single Biracial Family.” A review of The Time of Our Singing, by Ron Charles, Christian Science Monitor (January 23, 2003): 15. The best black novel to appear in America since “Beloved” has just been written by a white man. (Or at least so, Read More
“Hearing America Singing in the Lives of One Family,” a review of The Time of Our Singing, by Dan Cryer, Newday, January 22, 2003. There has never been any doubt about Richard Powers’ bold ambition. When minimalism was all the rage in the ’80s, this writer dared to think big. In his very first novel, “Three, Read More
“Mind Painting,” a review of Plowing the Dark, by John Leonard, New York Review of Books, January 11, 2001.
“Novel Thoughts: Four Fiction Writers with Metaphysics on Their Minds” by John Updike, New Yorker 71 (August 21, 1995): 105. John Updike admits to crying over Powers’s neural network AI, Helen, from Galatea 2.2.
Tom Hiney on Richard Powers’ epic and furious novel about our freaked-out future: “Operation Wandering Soul,” in The Independent, February 26, 1994. “In these celebrity-hungry days, a lot of talentless people make it into the household name database. Yet here is Richard Powers; angry, eloquent, streetwise, funny and still generally unknown outside ‘Contemporary American Literature’, Read More
What Is the Meaning of Life?,” a review of The Gold Bug Variations, by Paul Gray, Time, September 2, 1991. ALSO: Time named The Gold Bug Variations its #1 novel for 1991.
A review of The Gold Bug Variations, “Bach Would’ve Liked This Molecule,” by Louis B. Jones, appeared in the New York Times, August 25, 1991.
Kirkus review of The Gold Bug Variations, June 1, 1991. A formidable masterpiece, deeply vital and sparkling in its many facets, whimsical in its prose yet precise in its elucidation—rewarding in every sense but, in particular, a profoundly moving love story.