Pulitzer Prize winner!! Richard Powers, PLAYGROUND
Totally Booked with Zibby
Zibby Owens
4.5 • 643 Ratings
🗓️ 25 September 2024
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Zibby interviews Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author Richard Powers about his magisterial new novel, PLAYGROUND, where four lives come together on the French Polynesian island of Makatea, where plans are being made to send floating, autonomous cities out onto the open sea. Richard delves into his characters, including two Chicagoans, a northside white kid named Todd and a southside Black kid named Rafi, who have a decades-long friendship shaped by shared trauma, intellect, competition, and love. He also talks about the issues of technological innovation, memory, and cultural preservation that his characters face. Finally, he shares the personal anecdotes that influenced the novel, including the loss of his sister.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books, hosted by me, Zibi Owens. |
| 0:07.6 | It's an award-winning podcast with over 1,900 episodes, all featuring authors of books you love and those you have yet to discover. |
| 0:15.5 | Listen daily five times a week. |
| 0:17.2 | Then go to Zivimedia.com and learn more about what the L.A. Times called the Zivieverse. |
| 0:22.7 | Zippy Media includes Zivis Bucshop, an independent bookstore in Santa Monica, |
| 0:27.2 | Zippy Books Publishing, Zippy Retreats, Zivis book club, and more. |
| 0:31.5 | Go check it out at Zivimedia.com and follow me on Instagram at Zivie Owens. |
| 0:36.8 | It'll take you where you need to go. Thanks for listening. |
| 0:43.1 | Richard Powers is the author of Playground, a novel. He's also the author of 14 novels, |
| 0:48.9 | including The Overstory, Bewilderment, and Orpheo. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Pulitzer Prize, |
| 0:56.3 | and the National Book Award. He lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. |
| 1:00.1 | Welcome, Richard. Thank you so much for coming on Mom Stone. Have Time to read books to discuss |
| 1:04.0 | playground. Oh, it's a pleasure to be here. Thanks so much for bringing me on. |
| 1:08.7 | It is not about going on a playground like kids and having fun. |
| 1:13.2 | This is not like a mother's guide to, you know, raising your kids or anything like that. |
| 1:17.8 | But it does have the very, very fun name that evokes that sense of joy. |
| 1:24.1 | Well, you know, it's funny because it was a strange joy to write the book. I've been writing for 40 years, I think is my 14th novel, and I don't think I've ever had as much of a pure gift or as much pleasure in telling a story. The way that things came together just seemed to drop out |
| 1:46.9 | of the sky on me. So I'm very grateful for that. Oh, wow. Which part dropped first? |
| 1:53.1 | I guess the story of the boy's friendship. So at the heart of this book, there's a slowly |
| 2:00.2 | unfolding and long duration friendship between two |
| 2:03.7 | Chicagoans, a north side white kid named Todd Keane and a southside black named Rafi Young. |
| 2:13.0 | And they go to an elite high school together and they form a kind of odd couple friendship over |
... |
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