Specimen Days

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, a man, and a 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 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. He also wrote "A Home at the End of the World," which was also adapted for the screen, and "Flesh and Blood." He lives in New York. A "Boston Globe" Best Book of the Year
A "Washington Post" Best Book of the Year
A "Chicago Tribune" Best Book of the Year
In each section of Michael Cunningham's novel, his first since "The Hours," we encounter the same group of characters: a young boy, a man, and a 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. "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 " "These three novellas give loose rein to his playful genius for description and rollicking plot."--Ethan Canin, "The ""Washington"" Post Book Review
""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
"" "Specimen Days"] is a love song of a novel, rich and melancholy and overflowing with smartness."--"The ""Boston"" Globe
""In his first novel since "The Hours," Michael Cunningham explores the unsettling effects of the industrial age. Splendid prose in a mesmerizing tale that tweaks our standard measures of time."--"Chicago"" Tribune
""Clearly and often compellingly the work of a gifted storyteller with an ambitious mind and a lyrical writing style."--"San Francisco Chronicle
""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
""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
""Cunningham's experimentation with the genres brings his prose to new energy . . . It] is exactly the kind of bold experiment that a novelist who takes his art seriously ought to make."--"New York" magazine
"Cunningham is a canny propagandist for the importance of imaginative literature . . . He] crosses genres elegantly."--"The Baltimore Sun
""An appealing and inventive fiction that indicates the range of as well as future possibilities for the novel . . . Cunningham's innovative triptych structure compels the reader, even after the novel is finished, to look for connections and patterns among the three strands . . . The intertextual dialogue between the three novellas and the sheer invention of the project should provide sufficient rewards for any reader."--"The News & Observer" (Raleigh)
"Michael Cunningham's new novel is extraordinary. It is strange and unusual and awkward to describe. It is also brilliant, as good as if not better than his stunning previous novel, "The Hours" . . . "Specimen Days" is a magnificent novel."--"Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
""Quite simply and even m