About the Author

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.

Reviews

"Powers is prodigiously talented, he writes lyrical prose, has a seductive sense of wonder and is an acute observer of social life." -- Jim Holt - The New York Times Book Review "Powers's talent for translating avant-garde music into engrossing vignettes on the page is inexhaustible. Els's obsession with avant-garde, which isolates him from everyone he loves, becomes the very thing that aligns him with the reader." -- Publishers Weekly, Starred review "The earmarks of the renowned novelist's work are here... but rarely have his novels been so tightly focused and emotionally compelling." -- Kirkus, Starred review "Bravo, Richard Powers, for hitting so many high notes with Orfeo and contributing to the fraction of books that really matter." -- Heller McAlpin - NPR "Orfeo reveals how a life, and the narrative of a life, accumulates, impossibly, infinitely, from every direction... In this retelling of the Orpheus myth Powers also manages enchantment." -- Scott Korb - Slate "Orfeo... establishes beyond any doubt that the novel is very much alive." -- Troy Jollimore - Chicago Tribune "Magnificent and moving." -- David Ulin - The Los Angeles Times "For sheer bravado in constructing sentences, few authors of contemporary fiction can surpass Powers...One of his finest yet." -- Ted Gioia - The San Francisco Chronicle "Powers' writing is complex and heady without being head-achy, and his synesthetic descriptions of finding melodies in the mundane are full of their own kind of music." -- Keith Staskiewicz - Entertainment Weekly "An extraordinary feat... makes the inaccessible comprehensible." -- Andrew Leonard - Salon "Biology and music, past and present, come together in a clever, explosive resolution." -- Adam Kirsch - Boston Globe "[T]he crowning achievement of this wildly imaginative Evanston native's distinguished career." -- Chicago Tribune