Specimen Days: A Novel
Apr 2007 · Farrar, Straus and Giroux
3.9star
11 reviewsreport
Ebook
320
Pages
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About this ebook
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.
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.
Ratings and reviews
3.9
11 reviews
A Google user
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Oh, my. My friend Susan (who has a sterling record of book referrals) lent me this and The Hours; I passed on the latter because I am really woefully ignorant about Virginia Woolf and picked up this one somewhat in desperation for bedtime reading -- then had to stay up till 1:30 in the morning to finish it. I didn't read any back-cover content so I had no idea that I would be taken on a journey from 19th century NYC to a grim post-9/11 present through to an imagined future with aliens, all imbued with the poetry of Walt Whitman. I googled up some very negative reviews of this book but I loved it and was amazed. What a craftsman Cunningham is. No question but that I'll also take up The Hours.
A Google user
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February 5, 2010
A second masterpiece (after The Hours) of Michael Cunningham. In The hours the lives of three people were intertwined together. In here we follow three characters in three historical periods, in three apparently unrelated separate novels. The historical background of each story is a different New York: the horrors of the industrial revolution, the fears of the Post September 2001, and a post apocalyptic feature. In each story the same characters come back over and over again, struggling over and over to understand the truth, to see what is hidden behind the reality, and to discover it in awe.
Hopefawn Levenson
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January 21, 2014
Must read at least twice!!
About the author
Michael Cunningham was raised in Los Angeles and lives in New York City. He is the author of the novels The Hours, A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, and By Nightfall. His work has appeared in The New Yorker and Best American Short Stories, and he is the recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award for The Hours, which was a New York Times bestseller, and was chosen as a Best Book of 1998 by The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Publishers Weekly. He is a Professor at Brooklyn College for the M.F.A program.
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