Michael Cunningham
Paperback | Pages: 336 pages Rating: 3.58 | 5443 Users | 572 Reviews
Identify Containing Books Specimen Days
| Title | : | Specimen Days |
| Author | : | Michael Cunningham |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Deluxe Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 336 pages |
| Published | : | April 18th 2006 by Picador USA (first published 2005) |
| Categories | : | Fiction. Science Fiction. Historical. Historical Fiction. Short Stories |
Description Conducive To Books Specimen Days
Lucas, Catherine, Simon: three characters meet time and again in the three linked narratives that form ‘Specimen Days’. The first, a science fiction of the past, tells of a boy whose brother was ‘devoured’ by the machine he operated. The second is a noirish thriller set in our century, as a police psychologist attempts to track down a group of terrorists. And the third and final strand accompanies two strange beings into the future.A novel of connecting and reconnecting, inspired by the writings of the great visionary poet Walt Whitman, Specimen Days is a genre-bending, haunting ode to life itself – a work of surpassing power and beauty by one of the most original and daring writers at work today
Particularize Books To Specimen Days
| Original Title: | Specimen Days |
| ISBN: | 0312425023 (ISBN13: 9780312425029) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Literary Awards: | Ohioana Book Award for Fiction (2006) |
Rating Containing Books Specimen Days
Ratings: 3.58 From 5443 Users | 572 ReviewsComment On Containing Books Specimen Days
I knew little of Michael Cunninghams work (I just knew that he wrote The Hours which was an Academy Award-winning film my parents loved) so I had no fixed expectations. I gave myself four days to finish this book but managed to do so in three days. Thats how captivating it was. Cunninghams experimental fiction was masterfully told, like a musical composition that rises and falls with the right notes. In Specimen Days, he writes in three genres, dividing the book into three breathtaking novellas.American writer who is more known for 1988's Pulitzer awardee for Fiction The Hours, Michael Cummingham (born 1952) first published this book, The Specimen Days in 2005. If The Hours is based on Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, The Specimen Days is based on the Walt Whitman's complete collection of poetry and collected prose bearing the same title.If there is an award for the most organized and ambitious structure for a trilogy, it has to be this Cunningham work. The reason is that this book is
Three novellas set in New York in different centuries, linked by three similar characters (a woman, a man and a disfigured kid), the poetry of Walt Whitman and, why not, a small white bowl. It took me about a year to get through this book, so I can't guarantee that the presence of the bowl doesn't have a deeper signification. If it does, I missed it. Must be a pretty special bowl though, to get through the industrial revolution, present day America, post-apocalyptic alien populated world, and
Before reading this book, I came across a couple of comments (one that I heard directed to Cunningham himself at the Tennessee Williams Festival in N.O. last month) that addressed Cunningham 'copying' himself, that he was doing here with Whitman what he did with Woolf in The Hours. It is true that each writer has a lot to do with each respective novel, but beyond that I see no similarity.At the aforementioned literary fest, I heard Cunningham call himself a 'language queen' and then later in the
I have to preface this review by saying this is the first Michael Cunningham novel I have read -- I'm not familiar with "The Hours" nor the movie of the same name (although I do have the Philip Glass soundtrack). With that in mind, read on:I have just finished "Specimen Days - A Novel" by Michael Cunningham. The book is set in three parts, whereas the first takes place approximately a hundred years in the past, the second in the near present or near future, and the third in the distant future.
He wanted to tell her that he was inspired and vigilant and recklessly alone, that his body contained his unsteady heart and something else, something he felt but could not describe: porous and spiky, shifting with flecks of thought, with urge and memory; salted with brightness, flickerings of white and green and pale gold; something that loved stars because it was made of the same substance. He needed to tell her it was impossible, it was unbearable, to be so continually mistaken for a
They say Walt Whitman's beard drew butterflies. This book, I think, would probably draw something far stranger if left out in a field.A triptych of tightly-wound exercises in genre--a Machine Age ghost story, a whodunnit set in the Patriot Act hysteria of the mid 00s, and a scifi roadtrip through a blighted America featuring lizard people--Specimen Days baffled the hell out of me. Is it an extended meditation on the machinations and strangeness of our bodies? A sly, Marx-friendly comment on how
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