IN ONE OF the most anticipated novels of the year, Michael Cunningham delivers a bold new story. The author of the enormously successful The Hours and A Home at the End of the World brings us three brilliant linked narratives, each set in the ever-mysterious, ever-changing and ever-turbulent city of New York.
 Cunningham populates each section of his stunning narrative with the same characters: a young boy, an older man and a young woman. "In the Machine" is a ghost story that takes place at the height of the Industrial Revolution, as human beings confront the alienated realities of the new machine age. "The Children's Crusade," set in the early twenty-first century, plays with the conventions of the noir thriller as it tracks the pursuit of a terrorist band that is detonating bombs seemingly at random throughout the city. The third part of the novel, "Like Beauty," evokes a New York 10 years into the future, when the great city is all but overwhelmed by refugees from the first inhabited planet to be contacted by the people of Earth.
 Presiding over each episode of this interrelated whole is the prophetic figure of the poet Walt Whitman, who promises his future readers, "It avails not, neither distance nor place...I am with you, and know how it is." Specimen Days is a genre-bending, haunting and transformative ode to life in one of our greatest cities - a work of surpassing power and beauty by one of the most original and daring writers at work today.

Specimen Days

Literature & Fiction

CUNNINGHAM, Michael

Literary

HarperCollins, Publishers

In this bold novel, Michael Cunningham, the Pulitzer Prize–winningauthor of The Hours and A Home at the End of the World, spinsthree brilliant linked narratives, each set in the ever-mysterious, everchangingand ever-turbulent city of New York. From a ghost story that takes place at theheight of the Industrial Revolution, to a noir thriller of terrorism inthe early 21st century, to a tale of a future New York overwhelmed by alienrefugees, Specimen Days is a genrebending, haunting novel ofmetamorphosis.
Acclaimed by critics and readers, this is a literary work ofaudacious power and beauty by one of the most original and daring authorswriting today.

Genre Fiction

Harper-perennial

Specimen days

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of `The Hours', time, technology and love are the central concerns of a provocative novel that calls to mind David Mitchell's `Cloud Atlas'. Lucas, Catherine, Simon: three characters meet time and again in the three linked narratives that form `Specimen Days'. The first, a science fiction of the past, tells of a boy whose brother was `devoured' by the machine he operated. The second is a noirish thriller set in our century, as a police psychologist attempts to track down a group of terrorists. And the third and final strand accompanies two strange beings into the future. A novel of connecting and reconnecting, inspired by the writings of the great visionary poet Walt Whitman, `Specimen Days' is a genre-bending, haunting ode to life itself - a work of surpassing power and beauty by one of the most original and daring writers at work today.

Contemporary

Picador; Farrar, Straus and Giroux

4th Estate

The whole course of one's life really can change in an instant. Peter is forty-four, prosperous, the owner of a big New York apartment, a player in the NY contemporary art dealing scene. He has been married to Rebecca for close on twenty years. Their marriage is sound, in the way marriages are. Peter might even describe himself to be happy. But when Mizzy, Rebecca's much younger brother, comes to stay, his world is turned upside down. Returning to their New York flat after work one day, Peter sees the outline of Rebecca in the shower. But when he opens the shower door, it is Mizzy he comes face to face with. From that moment on, Mizzy occupies all of Peter's thoughts. His fascination with him is erotic but not exactly sexual. Without ever really falling out of love with his wife, he tumbles into love with her brother, and is encouraged that way by the young man. With traces of the tensions that ripple through Thomas Mann's 'Death in Venice', this new novel from Michael Cunningham brilliantly examines the quest for unattainable, and temporal, beauty.

By Nightfall

The Snow Queen

Humor & Satire

Fourth Estate

A Wild Swan: And Other Tales

Farrar. Straus & Giroux

Here are the moments that our fairy tales forgot or deliberately concealed, reimagined by one of the most gifted storytellers of his generation, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Hours, and exquisitely illustrated by Yuko Shimizu. Rarely have our bedtime stories been this dark, this perverse, or this true.
The Beast stands ahead of you in line at the convenience store, buying smokes and a Slim Jim, his devouring smile aimed at the cashier. A malformed little man with a knack for minor acts of wizardry goes to disastrous lengths to procure a child. A loutish and lazy Jack prefers living in his mother's basement to getting a job, until the day he trades a cow for a handful of magic beans.
In A Wild Swan and Other Tales, the people and the talismans of lands far, far away – the mythic figures of our childhoods and the source of so much of our wonder – are transformed by Michael Cunningham into stories of sublime revelation.

A Wild Swan

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by CUNNINGHAM, Michael. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by CUNNINGHAM, Michael