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.

Specimen Days

Literature & Fiction

MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM

Contemporary

HarperPerennial / HarperCollins

The Hours (The Perennial Collection)

Harper-perennial

By Nightfall

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.

Fourth Estate (GB)

A New York Times BestsellerPeter and Rebecca Harris, midforties, are prosperous denizens of Manhattan. He’s an art dealer, she’s an editor. They live well. They have their troubles—their ebbing passions, their wayward daughter, and certain doubts about their careers—but they feel as though they’re happy. Happy enough. Until Rebecca’s much younger, look-alike brother, Ethan (known in the family as Mizzy, short for the Mistake), comes to visit. And after he arrives, nothing will ever be the same again.This poetic and compelling masterpiece is a heartbreaking look at a marriage and the way we now live. Full of shocks and aftershocks, By Nightfall is a novel about the uses and meaning of beauty, and the place of love in our lives.

Literary

Harper Collins Ome

The Snow Queen

Beautiful and heartbreaking, comic and tragic, The Snow Queen once again proves that Michael Cunningham is one of the great novelists of his generationMichael Cunningham's luminous novel begins with a vision. It's November 2004. Barrett Meeks, having lost love yet again, is walking through Central Park when he is inspired to look up at the sky; there he sees a pale, translucent light that seems to regard him in a distinctly godlike way. Barrett doesn't believe in visions—or in God—but he can't deny what he's seen.At the same time, in the not-quite-gentrified Bushwick neighbourhood of Brooklyn, Tyler, Barrett's older brother, a struggling musician, is trying—and failing—to write a song for Beth, his wife-to-be, who is seriously ill. Tyler is determined to write a wedding song that will be not merely a sentimental ballad, but an enduring expression of love. Barrett, haunted by the light, turns unexpectedly to religion. Tyler grows increasingly convinced that only drugs can release his creative powers. Beth tries to face mortality with as much courage as she can summon.Cunningham follows the Meeks brothers as each turns down a different path in his search for transcendence. In subtle, lucid prose, he demonstrates a profound empathy for his conflicted characters and a singular understanding of what lies at the depth of the human soul.

Fourth Estate Ltd.

Xthe Hours Bk People

Fourth Estate

Genre Fiction

4th Estate

The world-famous masterpiece by Nobel laureate Thomas Mann―here in a new translation by Michael Henry Heim Published on the eve of World War I, a decade after Buddenbrooks had established Thomas Mann as a literary celebrity, Death in Venice tells the story of Gustave von Aschenbach, a successful but aging writer who follows his wanderlust to Venice in search of spiritual fulfillment that instead leads to his erotic doom.
 In the decaying city, besieged by an unnamed epidemic, he becomes obsessed with an exquisite Polish boy, Tadzio. “It is a story of the voluptuousness of doom,” Mann wrote. “But the problem I had especially in mind was that of the artist’s dignity.”

Death in Venice

Michael Henry Heim

United States

Ecco

In this celebration of one of America's oldest towns (incorporated in 1720), Michael Cunningham, author of the best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Hours", brings us Provincetown, one of the most idosyncratic and extraordinary towns in the United States, perched on the sandy tip at the end of Cape Cod. Provincetown, eccentric, physically remote, and heartbreakingly beautiful, has been amenable and intriguing to outsiders for as long as it has existed. "It is the only small townI know of where those who live unconventionally seem to outnumber those who live within the prescribed bounds of home and licensed marriage, respectable job, and biological children," says Cunningham. "It is one of the places in the world you can disappear into. It is the Morocco of North America, the New Orleans of the north." He first came to the place more than twenty years ago, falling in love with the haunted beauty of its seascape and the rambunctious charm of its denziens. Although Provincetown is primarily known as a summer mecca of stunning beaches, quirky shops and wild nightlife, as well as a popular destination for gay men and lesbians, it is also a place of deep and enduring history, artistic and otherwise. Few towns have attracted such an array of artists and writers - from Tennessee Williams to Eugene O'Neill, Mark Rothko to Robert Motherwell - who, like Cunningham were attracted to this finger of land because it was...different, nonjudgmental, the perfect place to escape to, to be rescued, healed and reborn, or simply to live in peace. As we follow Cunningham on his various excursions through Provincetown and its surrounding landscape, we are drawn into its history, its mysteries, its peculiarities - places you won't read about in any conventional travel guide.

Land's End : A Walk Through Provincetown

Travel

Vintage Books USA

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Books by MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM