Plowing the Dark

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Powers's Plowing the Dark recasts the rules of the novel and remains one his most daring works--a mesmerizing fiction explores the imagination's power to both destroy and save.

In a digital laboratory on the shores of Puget Sound, a band of virtual-reality researchers races 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, an American is held hostage, chained to a radiator in another empty white room. What can possibly join these two remote places? Only the shared imagination, a room that these people unwittingly build in common, where they are all about to meet.

Adie Klarpol, a skilled but disillusioned artist, comes back to life, revived by the thrill of working with cutting-edge technology. Against the collapse of Cold War empires and the fall of the Berlin Wall, she retreats dangerously into the cyber-realities she has been hired to create. On the other side of the globe, Taimur Martin, an English teacher recovering from a failed love affair, is picked up off the streets in Beirut by Islamic fundamentalists and held in solitary captivity.

Mention Richard Powers' name to other writers and see them get that faraway look in their eyes: They are calculating the eventual reach of his influence.--Sven Birkerts, Esquire

Author: Richard Powers, Powers Richard
Publisher: St. Martins Press-3PL
Published: 08/11/2001
Pages: 400
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.45lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 1.10d
ISBN13: 9780312280123
ISBN10: 0312280122
BISAC Categories:
- Fiction | Literary
- Fiction | World Literature | American | 21st Century

About the Author
RICHARD POWERS is the author of twelve novels, most recently The Overstory, which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, as well as The Echo Maker, which won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Powers has received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Historical Fiction, and is a four-time National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. He lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.

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