Michael Cunningham is the author of the bestselling novel The Hours, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award and was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film, A Home at the End of the World, also adapted for the screen, and Flesh and Blood, all published by FSG. He lives in New York.
"Specimen Days offers just about every kind of literary pleasure, and all of them in abundance: suspense, hilarity, invention, romance, and passage after passage of breathtaking prose." --Ethan Canin, The Washington Post "Michael Cunningham has taken a quantum leap imaginatively, stylistically, and thematically in this bewitching novel of a metamorphosing New York City. . . . Brilliantly conceived, empathic, darkly humorous, and gorgeously rendered, Cunningham's galvanizing novel . . . is a genuine literary event." --Booklist (starred review) "An extraordinary book, as ambitious as it is generous . . . I promise you fun, marvels, adventure, love stories, plus the uninhibited exercise of a great natural writer and an inspired historian. . . . This is a transforming book, the lovely, tattered record of our time and place, and of our wish to prevail." --David Thomson, The New York Observer "[Specimen Days] is a love song of a novel, rich and melancholy and overflowing with smartness." --The Boston Globe "Another dazzling tour de force." --Library Journal "An astonishing accomplishment and the best book Cunningham has written." --O magazine "One of the most luminous and penetrating novels to appear this year." --The Oregonian (Portland) "It is his unique moral vision that successfully hinges three distinct narrative panels into a triptych of unified beauty. It's what raises his individual stories out of their genres into the glorious realm of art . . . Big, haunting, beautiful." --Los Angeles Times Book Review "[A] tour de force." --People**** "Exquisitely written." --Entertainment Weekly "Stunning . . . It is a rich reading experience, going from the brutal factory scenes to the thriller of the middle section, and then on to the brave new world of the final section. Cunningham has made something substantively and stylistically bold out of these stories, keeping his many fires stoked and pulling the parts together as a brilliant whole." --The Seattle Times "Quite simply and even more impressively than in The Hours, Cunningham writes like an angel. . . . Read this magical, spellbinding novel." --The Atlanta Journal-Constitution "Like Whitman, Cunningham too sings America, in all its grime and glory . . . and Specimen Days is a book of wonders." --The Times Picayune (New Orleans) "Line by line, page by page, one of the most beautifully executed experiments of the decade." --NPR's All Things Considered
Just as Virginia Woolf haunts Cunningham's The Hours, Walt Whitman colors the novelist's latest effort. Specimen Days tells three stories, all set in Manhattan from different time periods, linked by characters with the same names and by Whitman's poetry. Whitman himself appears briefly in the 19th-century episode, the most moving and evocative of the three, in which a 13-year-old boy, the son of Irish immigrants, works in a factory. The second is set in the present and follows a police psychologist as she investigates a series of bizarre murder-suicides. The last occurs 150 years in the future: Manhattan has become a theme park, and tourists pay to be assaulted. Cunningham's themes never quite come into focus, despite his lyrical writing. Each section illustrates a genre (ghost story, police procedural, and sf) with which the author is not completely comfortable. On the other hand, Alan Cumming gives a brilliant and heartfelt, though never sentimental, reading. Recommended.-Michael Adams, CUNY Graduate Ctr. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Adult/High School-Billed as a novel, this Walt Whitman-inspired genre bender works more as three novellas, each one tackling a different form. "In the Machine" is a ghost story of sorts set in mid-1800s New York City. Young Luke takes a job at the factory where his older brother was killed. He falls in love with Simon's girlfriend and begins to hear his dead brother's voice speaking to him through the violent poundings, whirrings, and clankings. While the 19th-century style of writing evokes a dark, spooky atmosphere, some readers may be put off a little by the slow pace. "The Children's Crusade" carries readers to post-9/11 New York. Cat, a forensic psychologist, investigates a network of terrorists who use children to commit attacks. Suspenseful and exciting, the tale moves beyond the norms of the typical thriller by dredging up deep issues from Cat's past. "Like Beauty" takes place 150 years into the future. There, the simulo, or android, Simon and the lizardlike alien Catareen join in a bizarre and terrifying road trip from New York City to Denver. Cunnigham does a wonderful job of creating a postapocalyptic society that's frightening and surreal, but also surprisingly believable. The three stories don't connect so much as reflect off one another by way of reusing characters' names and descriptions and revisiting locales. Cunningham's fans might be a little disconcerted by the content at first, but they will find the same flair for language, skillfully developed characters, and themes of identity and longing that make the author's other works so successful.-Matthew L. Moffett, Northern Virginia Community College, Annandale Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
"Specimen Days offers just about every kind of literary pleasure, and all of them in abundance: suspense, hilarity, invention, romance, and passage after passage of breathtaking prose." --Ethan Canin, The Washington Post "Michael Cunningham has taken a quantum leap imaginatively, stylistically, and thematically in this bewitching novel of a metamorphosing New York City. . . . Brilliantly conceived, empathic, darkly humorous, and gorgeously rendered, Cunningham's galvanizing novel . . . is a genuine literary event." --Booklist (starred review) "An extraordinary book, as ambitious as it is generous . . . I promise you fun, marvels, adventure, love stories, plus the uninhibited exercise of a great natural writer and an inspired historian. . . . This is a transforming book, the lovely, tattered record of our time and place, and of our wish to prevail." --David Thomson, The New York Observer "[Specimen Days] is a love song of a novel, rich and melancholy and overflowing with smartness." --The Boston Globe "Another dazzling tour de force." --Library Journal "An astonishing accomplishment and the best book Cunningham has written." --O magazine "One of the most luminous and penetrating novels to appear this year." --The Oregonian (Portland) "It is his unique moral vision that successfully hinges three distinct narrative panels into a triptych of unified beauty. It's what raises his individual stories out of their genres into the glorious realm of art . . . Big, haunting, beautiful." --Los Angeles Times Book Review "[A] tour de force." --People**** "Exquisitely written." --Entertainment Weekly "Stunning . . . It is a rich reading experience, going from the brutal factory scenes to the thriller of the middle section, and then on to the brave new world of the final section. Cunningham has made something substantively and stylistically bold out of these stories, keeping his many fires stoked and pulling the parts together as a brilliant whole." --The Seattle Times "Quite simply and even more impressively than in The Hours, Cunningham writes like an angel. . . . Read this magical, spellbinding novel." --The Atlanta Journal-Constitution "Like Whitman, Cunningham too sings America, in all its grime and glory . . . and Specimen Days is a book of wonders." --The Times Picayune (New Orleans) "Line by line, page by page, one of the most beautifully executed experiments of the decade." --NPR's All Things Considered
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