The Gold Bug Variations

Name: The Gold Bug Variations
Brand: Recorded Books
Availability: InStock
Author: Richard Powers
ISBN: 9781980016700

Author: Richard Powers

Narrator: Rachel Botchan, Andrew Garman

Unabridged: 32 hr 22 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 12/21/2018

Categories: Fiction, Literary Fiction

Synopsis

A national bestseller, voted by Time as the #1 novel of 1991, selected as one of the "Best Books of 1991" by Publishers Weekly, and nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award--a magnificent story that probes the meaning of love, science, music, and art, by the brilliant author of Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance. Stuart Ressler, an up-and-coming molecular biologist, finds his career sidetracked by the turmoil of the sixties, and a young couple of the 1980s tries to discover why the biologist abandoned his scientific pursuits. The Gold Bug Variations is a double love story of two young couples separated by a distance of twenty-five years.

About Richard Powers

Richard Powers is the author of New York Times bestseller Bewilderment; The Overstory, which won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction; and The Echo Maker, which won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; among many other novels. Powers has received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Historical Fiction, and is a four-time National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. He lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Ed on August 11, 2017

In my review of 2666, I wrote about the effectiveness of ambiguity; the power of allowing the reader to infer connections and actively build a personal theory of meaning about a novel. The Gold Bug Variations takes a different approach. Compare it to Gravity’s Rainbow (to which it is on the back cov......more

Goodreads review by Ian on November 16, 2017

A Source of Meditative Awe As soon as I finished reading this novel, I wanted to respond the only way I could that would do justice to my feelings for the book: and that was to admit that I was in a state of wonder and to say that, in Richard Powers’ own words, the novel was "a source of meditative a......more

Goodreads review by Roger on June 09, 2016

Music of the Genetic Code Each time I have finished reading a book by the author (The Echo Maker, The Time of Our Singing, and Orfeo), true Powers fans have chimed in with, "Ah, but you must try The Gold Bug Variations!" For them, apparently, it stands as a gold standard of the author's work. It......more

Goodreads review by Greg on July 26, 2009

It's been about five years since I read this book. It was so good, so smart and so well constructed that I haven't read another Richard Powers book since. I feel like his books need to be saved for just the right time, I don't know when that time is, but I'd always like to have another of his books......more

Goodreads review by Jonathan on April 21, 2022

Tedious due to FAR too much science, its epic length adds to the dilemma..I did my best but could only handle the first 150 pages. As with all authors, his narrative style has evolved over the years and I personally find books written in the 2000's to be far more engaging. Conceptually its an interes......more