Richard Powers is an American novelist who is best known for writing about the effects of modern science and technology. One of his most well-known novels is The Echo Maker which was the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction. He is also the author of The Overstory which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2019.

Powers attended the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign where he earned his BA and later his MA in Literature. He graduated in 1980 and decided to forgo pursuing his PhD as he felt that many graduate students and professors didn’t find pleasure in reading or writing which is something that he didn’t want for himself. He made his debut in writing with Three Framers on Their Way to a Dance which was published in 1985.

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Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance(1985)Description / Buy at Amazon.com
Prisoner's Dilemma(1988)Description / Buy at Amazon.com
The Gold Bug Variations(1991)Description / Buy at Amazon.com
Operation Wandering Soul(1993)Description / Buy at Amazon.com
Galatea 2.2(1995)Description / Buy at Amazon.com
Gain(1998)Description / Buy at Amazon.com
Plowing the Dark(2000)Description / Buy at Amazon.com
The Time of Our Singing(2002)Description / Buy at Amazon.com
The Echo Maker(2006)Description / Buy at Amazon.com
Generosity(2009)Description / Buy at Amazon.com
Orfeo(2014)Description / Buy at Amazon.com
The Overstory(2018)Description / Buy at Amazon.com
Bewilderment(2021)Description / Buy at Amazon.com
Playground(2024)Description / Buy at Amazon.com

Publication Order of Anthologies

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If You Like Richard Powers Books, You’ll Love…

The Echo Maker is one of Richard Powers’ most popular novels. The book starts with Mark Schluter driving on a Nebraska road on a winter night when he flips his truck and nearly dies. He has a traumatic head injury and his sister Karin, his only family, returns to their hometown to help get him back to health. When Mark awakens from his coma, he believes that this woman is not his sister but an identical impostor. Karin is hurt by this and brings in a cognitive neurologist named Gerald Weber to help with her brother. He has a belief of what is wrong with him, but Marks behavior undermines much of what he believes. While Mark himself attempts to learn what happened to him on the night of the accident and the truth will change the lives of all three of them.

The Pulitzer Prize winning The Overstory is a sweeping work of activism and resistance. The story is about the essential conflict our planet Earth – the battle between humanss and nonhumans. The story focuses on a handful of people who are summoned in different ways by trees and then brought together in a violent stand to save the continent’s remaining acres of untouched forest. The book seeks to answer the important question of our world:if the trees of this earth could speak, what would they tell us?

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