Recommendations from our site
“I had the experience of having the revelation that the author clearly hoped a reader would have, which is that what appears to be a book about distinct individuals—almost a book of short stories— turns out to be something more complex, in which all the characters are linked through time and space.” Read more...
The Best Climate Books of 2019
Sarah Dry, Science Writer
“Feels at the beginning like a series of short stories, each of which has some important thing about a tree or a kind of tree in it, but also holds some human character. You’d be a very strange person if you came away from this book not caring about what’s happening to the trees.” Read more...
Kwame Anthony Appiah, Philosopher
Overstory by Richard Powers, a work of genius which won the Pulitzer Prize, is one of the most ambitious and successful pieces of fiction that I’ve read. It’s focused on the unlikely convergence of figures from disparate backgrounds around incidents of eco-terrorism in America’s West. The plot picks up on the derangements of the Anthropocene age, as we are coming to realize that humankind’s footprint is impacting Earth’s system in unprecedented ways. Overstory fits the template of collective fiction, like Moby-Dick, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, and the U.S.A. trilogy by John Dos Passos. They are all about the democratic collective under duress.
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