Richard Powers is the author of fourteen novels, including The Overstory, Bewilderment, and Orfeo. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Award. He lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.
"An ingeniously structured narrative that branches and canopies
like the trees at the core of the story whose wonder and
connectivity echo those of the humans living amongst them."
*citation from the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction*
"Autumn makes me think of leaves, which makes me think of trees,
which makes me think of The Overstory, the best novel ever written
about trees, and really, just one of the best novels, period."
*Ann Patchett*
"Monumental…The Overstory accomplishes what few living writers from
either camp, art or science, could attempt. Using the tools of the
story, he pulls readers heart-first into a perspective so much
longer-lived and more subtly developed than the human purview that
we gain glimpses of a vast, primordial sensibility, while watching
our own kind get whittled down to size....A gigantic fable of
genuine truths."
*Barbara Kingsolver, The New York Times Book Review (cover
review)*
"Remarkable....This ambitious novel soars up through the canopy of
American literature and remakes the landscape of environmental
fiction."
*Ron Charles - Washington Post*
"A big, ambitious epic....Powers juggles the personal dramas of his
far-flung cast with vigor and clarity. The human elements of the
book—the arcs his characters follow over the decades from crusading
passion to muddled regret and a sense of failure—are thoroughly
compelling. So are the extra-human elements, thanks to the
extraordinary imaginative flights of Powers’s prose, which
persuades you on the very first page that you’re hearing the voices
of trees as they chide our species."
*Michael Upchurch - Boston Globe*
"A rousing, full-throated hymn to Nature’s grandeur."
*Dan Cryer - San Francisco Chronicle*
"An extraordinary novel....An astonishing performance....There is
something exhilarating, too, in reading a novel whose context is
wider than human life. The Overstory leaves you with a slightly
adjusted frame of reference....What was happening to his characters
passed into my conscience, like alcohol into the bloodstream, and
left a feeling behind of grief or guilt, even after I put it
down."
*Benjamin Markovits - The Guardian*
"Powers is the rare American novelist writing in the grand realist
tradition, daring to cast himself, in the critic Peter Brooks’s
term, as a 'historian of contemporary society.' He has the courage
and intellectual stamina to explore our most complex social
questions with originality, nuance, and an innate skepticism about
dogma. At a time when literary convention favors novelists who
write narrowly about personal experience, Powers’s ambit is
refreshingly unfashionable, restoring to the form an authority it
has shirked."
*Nathaniel Rich - The Atlantic*
"This book is beyond special. Richard Powers manages to turn trees
into vivid and engaging characters, something that indigenous
people have done for eons but that modern literature has rarely if
ever even attempted. It's not just a completely absorbing, even
overwhelming book; it's a kind of breakthrough in the ways we think
about and understand the world around us, at a moment when that is
desperately needed."
*Bill McKibben*
"The Overstory is a visionary, accessible legend for the planet
that owns us, its exaltation and its peril, a remarkable
achievement by a great writer."
*Thomas McGuane*
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