John Powers
John Powers is the pop culture and critic-at-large on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross. He previously served for six years as the film critic.
Powers spent the last 25 years as a critic and columnist, first for LA Weekly, then Vogue. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Harper's BAZAAR, The Nation, Gourmet, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.
A former professor at Georgetown University, Powers is the author of Sore Winners, a study of American culture during President George W. Bush's administration. His latest book, WKW: The Cinema of Wong Kar Wai (co-written with Wong Kar Wai), is an April 2016 release by Rizzoli.
He lives in Pasadena, California, with his wife, filmmaker Sandi Tan.
-
Attica Locke's new novel centers on a black Texas ranger's effort to find the vanished son of a white supremacist. Heaven, My Home offers an unsettling American spin on a complicated crime story.
-
A new film chronicles what happens when a Chinese billionaire reopens a former General Motors plant in Ohio. John Powers says it's an old-school observational documentary in the very best sense.
-
Hatidze Muratova lives in a remote area of Macedonia and has one simple rule: When you harvest honey, you take half — and leave the other half for the bees. An elegant new documentary tells her story.
-
The six-part BBC series airing on HBO follows one British family over the course of 15 years of upheaval, beginning in 2019. The unsettling show imagines the dismal future that liberals fear.
-
Meryl Streep joins the Big Little Liescast as the mother of the man killed at the end of Season 1 — complicating things for the Monterey Five, who are still processing the aftermath of the death.
-
Ruth Wilson stars in the PBS drama based on the story of her own grandmother, who discovered, after 22 years of marriage, that her spy-turned-author husband may have been married to someone else.
-
Lauren Wilkinson's sharp debut novel about a black woman living a double life as a spy spans three decades and leapfrogs from New York to the Caribbean to West Africa.
-
Each year, Fresh Air critic-at-large John Powers finds himself haunted by the books, movies and shows that he loved but wasn't able to review on the air.
-
Gina Apostol's dizzying new novel begin in present-day Manila before diving into the late 19th century — and the tortuous relationship between the U.S. and the Philippines.
-
Olga Tokarczuk's book won the 2018 Man Booker International Prize. Critic John Powers says the hard-to-classify work is positively exploding with maps, remembrances, riffs, history and more.
-
A new BBC miniseries streaming on Amazon and starring Hugh Grant tells the story of Britain's Thorpe affair, a 1970s tabloid fiesta that brought together politics, illicit sex and a criminal trial.
-
Authors Dorthe Nors and Sayaka Murata use bracing good humor to subvert readers' expectations about single women in their new novels, Mirror, Shoulder, Signal and Convenience Store Woman.