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A dazzling new novel by the author of Galatea 2.2 and Gain
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.
A mesmerizing fiction that explores the imagination's power to both destroy and save, Plowing the Dark recasts the rules of the novel and stands as Richard Powers's most daring work to date.
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.
A mesmerizing fiction that explores the imagination's power to both destroy and save, Plowing the Dark recasts the rules of the novel and stands as Richard Powers's most daring work to date.
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Reviews
"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