Richard Powers with Marlon James: Playground | LIVE from NYPL

Powers returns to New York to discuss his latest novel, which intertwines tales of technology, race, friendships, and the environment. For event details and more, visit www.nypl.org/e...
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Playground is the latest novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times best-selling author of The Overstory and Bewilderment. Four lives are drawn together in a sweeping panoramic novel that travels from Chicagoland to the California coast to the South Pacific. A celebrated ocean adventurer, an artist, and two childhood friends who bonded over a 3000-year-old board game converge on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, whose deposits of phosphorus once helped to feed the world. Now the tiny atoll has been chosen for humanity’s next adventure: a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out onto the open sea. But first, the island’s residents must vote to greenlight the project or turn the seasteaders away.
Powers speaks with fellow novelist Marlon James.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Richard Powers is the author of fourteen novels, including The Overstory, Bewilderment, and Orfeo. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Award. He lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.
Marlon James was born in Jamaica in 1970. He is the author of the New York Times-bestseller Black Leopard, Red Wolf, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction in 2019. His novel A Brief History of Seven Killings won the 2015 Man Booker Prize. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature for fiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction, and the Minnesota Book Award. It was also a New York Times Notable Book. James is also the author of The Book of Night Women, which won the 2010 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Minnesota Book Award, and was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction and an NAACP Image Award. His first novel, John Crow’s Devil, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for first fiction and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and was a New York Times Editors’ Choice. James divides his time between Minnesota and New York.
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