| Specimen Days Contributor(s): Cunningham, Michael (Author) |
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ISBN: 0312425023 ISBN-13: 9780312425029 Publisher: Picador USA OUR PRICE: $18.00 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: April 2006 Annotation: The same group of characters--a young boy, an older man, and a young woman--are present in each historical period of this genre-bending, haunting, and transformative ode to life in New York. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Fiction | Short Stories (single Author) - Fiction | Literary |
| Dewey: FIC |
| Physical Information: 1" H x 5.5" W x 8.4" (0.95 lbs) 352 pages |
| Themes: - Cultural Region - Mid-Atlantic - Cultural Region - Northeast U.S. - Geographic Orientation - New York - Locality - New York, N.Y. |
| Accelerated Reader Info |
| Quiz #: 102563 Reading Level: 4.5 Interest Level: Upper Grades Point Value: 15.0 |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: 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. |
Contributor Bio(s): Cunningham, Michael: - MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM is the author of the novels A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, Specimen Days, By Nightfall, and The Snow Queen, as well as the collection A Wild Swan and Other Tales, and the nonfiction book Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and his work has appeared in The New Yorkerand The Best American Short Stories. The Hours was a New York Times bestseller, and the winner of both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Raised in Los Angeles, Michael Cunningham lives in New York City, and is a senior lecturer at Yale University. |