Plowing the Dark: A Novel

Title: Plowing the Dark: A Novel
Author: Powers, Richard
ISBN: 9780312280123
Publisher: Picador USA
Published: 2001
Binding: Paperback
Language: English
Condition: Used: Near Fine
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Fiction 1598732

Publisher Description:

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