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Specimen Days: Summary and book reviews of Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham, plus links to an excerpt from Specimen Days and a biography of Michael Cunningham.
Specimen Days
by
Michael Cunningham
Hardcover: Jun 2005,
320 pages.
Paperback: Apr 2006,
352 pages.
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.
Book Reviews
Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Engaging Walt Whitman as his muse, Cunningham weaves a captivating, strange and extravagant novel of human progress and social decline. .... This is daring, memorable fiction.
Booklist - Donna Seaman
Starred Review. Brilliantly conceived, empathic, darkly humorous, and gorgeously rendered, Cunningham's galvanizing novel [is] about the quest for justice and freedom, the parameters of the soul, the hunger for beauty, and the fluid interface between the natural and the engineered.
Kirkus Reviews - Bruce Allen
The use of several recurring images (an ornamental white bowl, a fire in a sewing machine factory) and Whitman's visionary idealism superbly underscore a symphonic poem of sorrow, loss, survival - and hope: Cunningham's finest novel, and one of the important literary achievements of the new century.
Bookpage - Robert Weibezahl Specimen Days is really three individually compelling stories that together form something greater. Cunningham's audacious eye, his ability to hone an unexpected image from an unlikely source, is in sharp focus, and the prowess he showed in The Hours for getting inside his character's heads is still in evidence.
Vanity Fair - Elissa Schappel
[Walt Whitman's] boundless spirit . . . imbues Specimen Days with a sense of wonder and magic.
USA Today
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.
O, the Oprah magazine - Vince Passaro
With imaginative daring and sentiment hardened by intellect and pain, Cunningham constructs three tales of New York...This is an astonishing accomplishment and the best book Cunningham has written.
You are about to travel to Edgecombe St. Mary, a small village in the English countryside filled with rolling hills, thatched cottages, and a cast of characters both hilariously original and as familiar as the members of your own family.
The Postmistress is an unforgettable tale of the secrets we must bear, or bury. It is about what happens to love during wartime, when those we cherish leave. And how every story-of love or war-is about looking left when we should have been looking right.
Masterfully blending true events with fiction, this blockbuster historical thriller delivers a page-turning murder mystery set on the sixteenth-century Oxford University campus.
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Specimen Days
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