Richard Powers has published fourteen novels. He is a MacArthur Fellow and received the National Book Award. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Overstory. He lives in the Great Smoky Mountains.
A love story of charm and substance, brimming over with ideas, yet anchored in emotional truth. The plot is as labyrinthine as any by Umberto Eco ... Extremely witty ... Dip into this book at random and the chances are it will sit up and bite you like a rattlesnake * Sunday Telegraph * The most lavishly ambitious American novel since Gravity's Rainbow ... An outright marvel * Washington Post * The Gold Bug Variations has everything ... Stunning ... Almost every sentence is a heroic tour de force ... The joy to be taken in reading the book is, like the pleasure of studying crystal multiplication, in seeing a pattern swarm mosaically over everything, watching a stencil laid over life * New York Times * One of the best writers working now * Audrey Niffenegger * Powers has triumphantly restored ... the philosophical novel * Observer *