By Washington Post book critic Ron CharlesHere are four great new books to sink into this fall. The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Powers is back with "Playground" (W.W.Norton), a brilliant new novel about artificial intelligence and the race to save the oceans.
The story moves along three tracks: There's a computer genius looking back at his life; an oceanographer recounting her love for sea creatures; and a small group of people on a tiny island in the South Pacific who've been offered a fortune by a shadowy group of tech billionaires.How Powers manages to draw these three stories together will change the way you see the world. Read an excerpt: "Playground" by Richard Powers"Playground" by Richard Powers (W.W.
Norton), in Hardcover, eBook and Audio formats, available via Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Bookshop.orgRichard Powers (Official site)"Creation Lake" by Rachel Kushner (Scribner) looks like a spy thriller, but it's even trickier than that.The narrator is a freelance agent who specializes in infiltrating radical groups.
She's been hired to pose as a translator in France and work her way into a commune of environmental terrorists who follow a spiritual leader who believes we should live more like the Neanderthals once did.But as she gets closer to sabotaging this group, she falls under the spell of this Neanderthal philosophy.Read an excerpt: "Creation Lake" by Rachel Kushner"Creation Lake" by Rachel Kushner (Scribner), in Hardcover, Large Print, eBook and Audio formats, available via Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Bookshop.orgRachel Kushner (Official site)Danzy Senna's "Colored Television" (Riverhead Books) is a sharp, witty satire of our attitudes about racial identity and pop culture.
At the center of the story is a writer who spent years working on a vast history of biracial people, only to discover that nobody will publish it.And so, desperate for money, she turns to Hollywood and tries to sell her ide...