Generosity

While teaching a Creative Nonfiction class, Chicagoan Russell Stone encounters a young Algerian woman with a disturbingly luminous presence. Thassadit Amzwar's blissful exuberance entrances and puzzles the melancholic Russell. How can this refugee from perpetual terror be so happy? Russell's amateur inquiries bring Thassa to the attention of a notorious geneticist whose research leads him to announce the genotype for happiness.

Richard Powers is the author of nine novels. The Echo Maker (FSG, 2006) won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Powers has received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Historical Fiction. He lives in Illinois.