DETAILS AND HOW TO WATCH: This is an online rebroadcast of Richard Powers live event as part of the 2024/2025 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series. This online event will be accessible from the Inprint website. Details on how to access the reading will be provided to season subscribers. Those who purchase general admission tickets for this rebroadcast event will be provided the viewing link on their Eventbrite email receipt in the “Additional Information” section.
Richard Powers will read from his new novel Playground followed by an on-stage conversation with author and National Book Critics Circle finalist Lacy M. Johnson. The evening will conclude with a book sale and signing. The event is presented as part of the 2024/2025 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series.
Richard Powers, a MacArthur “genius” fellow, “demonstrates a remarkable ability to tell dramatic, emotionally involving stories while delving into subjects many readers would otherwise find arcane…. [such as] genetics, pharmaceuticals, artificial intelligence, music, and photography” (The Washington Post). His 14 bestselling novels include The Echo Maker, winner of the National Book Award and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; The Time of Our Singing, winner of the Ambassador Award; Orfeo, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize; and The Overstory, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Ann Patchett called it “the best novel ever written about trees, and really just one of the best novels, period,” and Barbara Kingsolver wrote of the book, “The Overstory accomplishes what few living writers from either camp, art or science, could attempt….[A] gigantic fable of genuine truths.”
Powers returns to Houston to share his new novel, Playground, which threads together four lives from across the globe. Their stories converge on the tiny atoll of Makatea in French Polynesia, whose citizens must decide if they are willing to relinquish their island for the benefit of the world’s first floating autonomous city. Percival Everett says of Playground, “Is there anything Richard Powers cannot write? The world here is complete, seductive, and promising. The writing feels like the ocean. Vast, mysterious, deep, and alive.” Publishers Weekly calls it “An epic drama of AI, neocolonialism, and oceanography… dazzling…. [T]he elegance of [Powers’s] prose, the scope of his ambition, and the exacting reverence with which he writes about the imperiled world serve as reminders of why he ranks among America’s foremost novelists. Readers will be awed.”
Lacy M. Johnson is a Houston-based professor, curator, activist, and is author of The Reckonings, The Other Side — both National Book Critics Circle Award finalists — and Trespasses. She is editor, with the designer Cheryl Beckett, of More City Than Water: A Houston Flood Atlas. She teaches creative nonfiction at Rice University and is the Founding Director of the Houston Flood Museum.
