Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham

Description

Bibliographic Details

• Author: Michael Cunningham
• Title: Specimen Days
• Publisher: ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition (June 7, 2005)
• Language: ‎ English
• Format: Hardcover – 308 pages
• ISBN-10: ‎ 0374299625
• ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0374299620
• Item Weight: ‎ 1.30 pounds
• Dimensions: ‎ 9.0" x 0.9" x 6.0"
• Book Condition: Used – Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Missing Dust Jacket
• Edition: First Edition

Synopsis:

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.

About the Author:

Michael Cunningham is an American novelist and screenwriter. He is best known for his 1998 novel The Hours, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1999. Cunningham is a professor in the practice of creative writing at Yale University. 

Cunningham was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and grew up in La Cañada, California.[2][3] He studied English literature at Stanford University, where he earned his degree. Later, at the University of Iowa, he received a Michener Fellowship and was awarded a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. While studying at Iowa, he had short stories published in the Atlantic Monthly and the Paris Review. His short story "White Angel" was later used as a chapter in his novel A Home at the End of the World. It was included in "The Best American Short Stories, 1989", published by Houghton Mifflin.

In 1993, Cunningham received a Guggenheim Fellowship and in 1988 a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. In 1995 he was awarded a Whiting Award. Cunningham has taught at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and in the creative writing M.F.A. program at Brooklyn College. He is a senior lecturer of creative writing at Yale University.