Specimen Days
By Michael Cunningham
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Hardcover, 9780374299620, 320pp.)
Publication Date: June 7, 2005
Other Editions of This Title: eBook, Paperback (April 18, 2006), Compact Disc - Abridged (June 9, 2005), Audio Cassette (June 9, 2005), Compact Disc (June 9, 2005), Compact Disc (June 2005), Compact Disc (June 2005), Compact Disc (June 2005)
Categories: Literary, Short Stories (single author)
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In each section of Michael Cunningham's bold new novel, his first since The Hours, we encounter the same group of 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 alienating 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, around the city. The third part, "Like Beauty," evokes a New York 150 years into the future, when the 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 promised his future readers, "It avails not, neither time or place . . . I am with you, and know how it is." Specimen Days is a genre-bending, haunting, and transformative ode to life in our greatest city and a meditation on the direction and meaning of America's destiny. It is a work of surpassing power and beauty by one of the most original and daring writers at work today.
Michael Cunningham's most recent, best-selling novel, The Hours, won both the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner award, and became an Academy Award-winning film starring Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, and Meryl Streep. An earlier novel, A Home at the End of the World, was recently made into a film starring Colin Farrell, Dallas Roberts, Sissy Spacek, and Robin Wright Penn. Cunningham lives in New York.
“Another dazzling tour de force.” --Library Journal (starred review)
“[Walt Whitman’s] boundless spirit . . . imbues Specimen Days with a sense of wonder and magic.” --Elissa Schappel, Vanity Fair
Praise for The Hours:"A smashing literary tour de force and an utterly invigorating reading experience. If this book does not make you jump up from the sofa, looking at life and literature in new ways, check to see if you have a pulse." --USA Today
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