Moderator Joost de Vries delivered this introduction to Richard Powers.Ĭlick below to listen to Richard Powers read from The Overstory. Join us for a Sunday afternoon with an author who, according to the New York Times Book Review, is one of our most prodigiously talented novelists.

The book is about nine Americans whose unique life experiences with trees bring them together to address the destruction of forests. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. The Overstory is a riveting call to arms and a bitter indictment of our wasteful culture. The Overstory is a novel by Richard Powers published in 2018 by W. The Overstory is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of - and paean to - the natural world. You can also submit your own questions for Richard Powers on our. Richard Powers explores not just the ways that that humans beings live in and interact with the natural world, but more specifically, in a time of rapid environmental degradation, our dependence on trees for life itself. The Overstory by Richard Powers Below are questions to help guide your discussions as you read the book over the next month. The book develops into a remarkable and unforgettable story of the bond between trees and humans.

The Overstory, which is shortlisted for the upcoming Man Booker Prize, starts with the story of eight very different lives, each of which hinges in some way on a character’s relationship to trees. Or rather, a few characters in The Overstory become convinced that trees are talking to them. The trees are well-developed characters with interesting quirks who converse with each other, and with a handful of humans. National Book Award winning author Richard Powers took a risk with his new novel The Overstory: in it trees talk.

The overstory author