Specimen Days

Specimen Days

Author: Michael Cunningham

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2007-04-01

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 0374706247

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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.


By Nightfall

By Nightfall

Author: Michael Cunningham

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2010-09-28

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1429978090

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Peter and Rebecca Harris: mid-forties denizens of Manhattan's SoHo, nearing the apogee of committed careers in the arts—he a dealer, she an editor. With a spacious loft, a college-age daughter in Boston, and lively friends, they are admirable, enviable contemporary urbanites with every reason, it seems, to be happy. Then Rebecca's much younger look-alike brother, Ethan (known in thefamily as Mizzy, "the mistake"), shows up for a visit. A beautiful, beguiling twenty-three-year-old with a history of drug problems, Mizzy is wayward, at loose ends, looking for direction. And in his presence, Peter finds himself questioning his artists, their work, his career—the entire world he has so carefully constructed. Like his legendary, Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Hours, Michael Cunningham's masterly new novel is a heartbreaking look at the way we live now. Full of shocks and aftershocks, it makes us think and feel deeply about the uses and meaning of beauty and the place of love in our lives.


Flesh and Blood

Flesh and Blood

Author: Michael Cunningham

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2007-04-17

Total Pages: 484

ISBN-13: 1429937556

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This novel follows the Stassos family through four generations, as it is touched by ambition, love, violence, and the transforming effects of time.


The Specimen

The Specimen

Author: Pete Kahle

Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform

Published: 2014-04-09

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781495230004

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From a crater lake on an island off the coast of Bronze Age Estonia... To a crippled Viking warrior's conquest of England... To the bloody temple of an Aztec god of death and resurrection... Their presence has shaped our world. They are the Riders.One month ago, an urban explorer was drawn to an abandoned asylum in the mountains of northern Massachusetts. There he discovered a large specimen jar, containing something organic, unnatural and possibly alive. Now, he and a group of unsuspecting individuals have discovered one of history's most horrific secrets. Whether they want to or not, they are caught in the middle of a millennia-old war and the latest battle is about to begin.


The Snow Queen

The Snow Queen

Author: Michael Cunningham

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2014-05-06

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0374710341

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A darkly luminous new novel from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hours Michael 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 neighborhood of Brooklyn, Tyler, Barrett's older brother, a struggling musician, is trying—and failing—to write a wedding song for Beth, his wife-to-be, who is seriously ill. Tyler is determined to write a 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 travels 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 core of the human soul. The Snow Queen, beautiful and heartbreaking, comic and tragic, proves again that Cunningham is one of the great novelists of his generation.


Specimen Song

Specimen Song

Author: Peter Bowen

Publisher: Open Road Media

Published: 2012-03-13

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1453246754

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A “plain-spoken, deep-thinking Montana cattle inspector” takes on a serial killer in DC (The New York Times Book Review). With misgivings, cattle inspector and sometime deputy Gabriel Du Pré has left his hometown of Toussaint, Montana, for big-city Washington, DC, where the Métis Indian fiddler has agreed to play his people’s music for a Smithsonian festival. But like the frightened and confused horse galloping wildly down the National Mall, Du Pré is very much out of his element. He does know how to catch and calm a runaway horse, however. If only catching a killer could be so simple. When a Cree woman from Canada who came to sing in the festival is found murdered, her death is just the first in a series of fatal attacks on Native Americans. Each killing is foretold by a shaman, and each time a primitive weapon is used. As the body count rises, Du Pré fears he might be the serial killer’s ultimate target. New York Times–bestselling author Ridley Pearson says about Peter Bowen’s Montana mysteries: “The best of Tony Hillerman meets Zane Grey . . . Du Pré is a character of legendary proportions.” And Booklist calls Gabriel Du Pré “one of the most unusual characters working the fictional homicide beat.” Specimen Song is the 2nd book in The Montana Mysteries Featuring Gabriel Du Pré series, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.


The Hours / Mrs. Dalloway

The Hours / Mrs. Dalloway

Author: Michael Cunningham

Publisher: Picador

Published: 2022-05-03

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 1250852684

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Michael Cunningham brings together his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel with the masterpiece that inspired it, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. In The Hours, the acclaimed author Michael Cunningham draws inventively on the life and work of Virginia Woolf and the story of her novel, Mrs. Dalloway, to tell the story of a group of contemporary characters struggling with the conflicting claims of love and inheritance, hope and despair. In this edition, Cunningham brings his own Pulitzer Prize–winning novel together with Woolf’s masterpiece, which has long been hailed as a groundbreaking work of literary fiction and one of the finest novels written in English. The two novels, published side by side with a new introduction by Cunningham, display the extent of their affinity, and each illuminates new facets of the other in this joint volume. In his introduction, Cunningham re-creates the wonderment of his first encounter with Mrs. Dalloway at fifteen—as he writes, “I was lost. I was gone. I never recovered.” With this edition, Cunningham allows us to disappear into the world of Woolf and into his own brilliant mind.


A Wild Swan

A Wild Swan

Author: Michael Cunningham

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2015-11-10

Total Pages: 145

ISBN-13: 0374712603

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Fairy tales for our times from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hours A poisoned apple and a monkey's paw with the power to change fate; a girl whose extraordinarily long hair causes catastrophe; a man with one human arm and one swan's wing; and a house deep in the forest, constructed of gumdrops and gingerbread, vanilla frosting and boiled sugar. In A Wild Swan and Other Tales, the people and the talismans of lands far, far away—the mythic figures of our childhoods and the source of so much of our wonder—are transformed by Michael Cunningham into stories of sublime revelation. Here are the moments that our fairy tales forgot or deliberately concealed: the years after a spell is broken, the rapturous instant of a miracle unexpectedly realized, or the fate of a prince only half cured of a curse. The Beast stands ahead of you in line at the convenience store, buying smokes and a Slim Jim, his devouring smile aimed at the cashier. A malformed little man with a knack for minor acts of wizardry goes to disastrous lengths to procure a child. A loutish and lazy Jack prefers living in his mother's basement to getting a job, until the day he trades a cow for a handful of magic beans. Reimagined by one of the most gifted storytellers of his generation, and exquisitely illustrated by Yuko Shimizu, rarely have our bedtime stories been this dark, this perverse, or this true.