Plowing the Dark A Novel

In a digital laboratory on the shores of Puget Sound, a band of virtual-reality researchers rush to complete the Cavern, an empty white room that can become a jungle, a painting, or a vast Byzantine cathedral.In a war-torn Mediterranean city, a young man is held hostage in another empty white room, equipped only with his imagination and memory to navigate himself through his captivity.How these two disparate worlds come together make up the arc of Richard Powers' most boldly imagined and deeply humane novel to date. AUTHORBIO: Richard Powers is a MacArthur Fellow and a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award.He is the author of Three Farmers On Their Way to a Dance, Prisoner's Dilemma, The Gold Bug Variations, the National Book Award-nominated Operation Wandering Soul, the National Book Critics Circle Award-nominated Galatea 2.2, and Gain, winner of the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Historical Fiction.He lives in Illinois.

Richard Powers is a MacArthur Fellow and the author of Three Farmers On Their Way to a Dance, Prisoner's Dilemma, The Gold Bug Variations, the National Book Award-nominated Operation Wandering Soul, Galatea 2.2, nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Plowing the Dark, and, most recently, The Time of Our Singing. He lives in Illinois.

"Superb . . . Powers pulls off one of the most astonishing feats I've ever seen in literature . . . daring, unpredictable, and emotionally powerful."—Steven Moore, The Washington Post Book World

"A fiercely visual book . . . the effect is spectacular . . . The most visceral prose Powers has ever written."—Daniel Zalewski, The New York Times Book Review

"America's most ambitious novelist . . . Plowing The Dark is virtual reality composed in a language that will never go obsolete. No one who becomes immersed in its poetry will walk out the way he or she came in."—Kevin Berger, The San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

"Plowing The Dark may be [Powers's] most finely executed story yet . . . Relentless and mesmerizing . . . a beautiful homage to the sine qua non of consciousness itself . . . the final triumph of art over pain."—Gail Caldwell, The Boston Globe

"Powers has an inventive, virtuosic writing style that reserves him a special category in today's fiction . . . I don't have the space to do justice to all the wonders of craftsmanship in Plowing The Dark . . . This is the first emblematic novel of the 21st century, a lesson and an inspiration."—Judy Doenges, The Seattle Times

"[A] tour de force. It has overwhelming inventiveness and fun moments as well."—Donald Newlove, The Philadelphia Inquirer

"This is, ultimately, a novel of ideas, but one with a soul . . . There is much to admire in this novel, particularly the ingenious way in which reality is captured."—Scott Leibs, The San Diego Union-Tribune

"Full of intelligence, exacting analysis and supple prose . . . [a] magisterial storybook."—Corey Mesler, The Commercial Appeal

"Powers' twin tales are rife with echoes and allusions that reinforce their shared concern with the ways in which we reinvent our worlds."—Ralph Rugoff, LA Weekly

"Superb . . . perhaps [Powers'] greatest novel . . . Nearly every page of Powers' astonishing book has stunning ideas that will force you to re-evaluate everything you thought you knew about these subjects, and the implications you never imagined."—Steven Moore, The Newark Star-Ledger

"Powers displays his trademark intellectual richness . . . His prose makes technology sing and music compute."—Michael Harris, The Los Angeles Times