—Elle
“Michael Cunningham’s new novel is extraordinary. It is strange and unusual and awkward to describe. It is also brilliant, as good as if not better than his stunning previous novel, The Hours…. Specimen Days is a magnificent novel.”
—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“Specimen Days is rich and original…haunting.”
—The Nation
“This is a provoking and rewarding novel, with many incidental pleasures.”
—The Observer (London)
“Michael Cunningham has written another masterpiece.”
—The Roanoke Times
“Adventurous and haunting…Specimen Days is really three individually compelling stories that together form something greater…. A challenging and engaging work of fiction that proves Cunningham is more than a one-trick pony.”
—BookPage
“An appealing and inventive fiction that indicates the range of as well as future possibilities for the novel…. Cunningham’s innovative triptych structure compels the reader, even after the novel is finished, to look for connections and patterns among the three strands…. The intertextual dialogue between the three novellas and the sheer invention of the project should provide sufficient rewards for any reader.”
—The News & Observer (Raleigh, North Carolina)
“Clearly and often compellingly the work of a gifted storyteller with an ambitious mind and a lyrical writing style.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Cunningham is a canny propagandist for the importance of imaginative literature…. [He] crosses genres elegantly.”
—The Baltimore Sun
“Cunningham locates and appropriates the distinct pleasures of these different genres: small, palatable chunks of gloriously excessive Dickensian prose in ‘In the Machine’ fast-paced suspense, plot twists, and arch social commentary fuel ‘The Children’s Crusade’…and re-imagining the world in the sci-fi ‘Like Beauty’ is a contagiously fun exercise in dystopic satire—the insights are witty…. [His] mastery of the sentence and beautifully wrought image is never, ever in question.”
—LA Weekly
“Spectacularly ambitious, fascinatingly strange, and deeply moving.”
—The Columbus Dispatch
“Cunningham has delivered another true work of art.”
—The Kansas City Star
“Cunningham’s powerful lyrical pull ultimately draws us in.”
—The New Leader
“Rather wonderful…raises historical fiction, the detective story, and science fiction to the status of literature.”
—Salon.com
“This is the most intriguing, stimulating, and artistically satisfying novel I’ve read in years…. Cunningham takes material that in other hands might be titillating science fiction and masterfully turns it into heartfelt, poignant, and engaging human drama.”
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Intricately conceived, stylishly written, and admirably ambitious, this absorbing novel lingers in the mind.”
—The Sunday Times (London)
MORE FROM PULITZER PRIZE–WINNING AUTHOR MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM
By Nightfall
“There are sentences here so powerfully precise and beautiful that they almost hover above the page.”
—Entertainment Weekly
ISBN 978-0-312-61043-2 / E-ISBN 978-1-4299-7809-5
WWW.PICADORUSA.COM/BYNIGHTFALL
Specimen Days
“Specimen Days offers just about every kind of literary pleasure, and all of them in abundance: suspense, hilarity, invention, romance, and passage after passage of breathtaking prose.”
—Ethan Canin, The Washington Post
ISBN 978-0-312-42502-9 / E-ISBN 978-0-374-70624-1
WWW.PICADORUSA.COM/SPECIMENDAYS
Land’s End
“Cunningham’s short book is a haunting, beautiful piece of work…. A magnificent work of art.”
—The Washington Post
ISBN 978-1-250-01770-3 / E-ISBN 978-1-250-02566-1
WWW.PICADORUSA.COM/LANDSEND-1
The Hours
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE
“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.”
—USA Today
ISBN 978-0-312-24302-9 / E-ISBN 978-1-4299-5794-6
WWW.PICADORUSA.COM/THEHOURS
Flesh and Blood
“Reading Michael Cunningham is like putting on see-through glasses. He’s got this way of exposing his characters’ deepest inclinations and motivations, letting us peer through glass directly into their souls.”
—The Boston Globe
ISBN 978-0-312-42668-2 / E-ISBN 978-1-4299-3755-9
WWW.PICADORUSA.COM/FLESHANDBLOOD
A Home at the End of the World
“We come to feel that we know Jonathan, Bobby, and Clare as if we lived with them; yet each one retains the mystery that in people is called soul, and in fiction is called art.”—The Los Angeles Times
ISBN 978-0-312-20231-6 / E-ISBN 978-0-374-70759-0
WWW.PICADORUSA.COM/AHOMEATTHEENDOFTHEWORLD
PICADOR
www.picadorusa.com
www.facebook.com/picadorusa • www.twitter.com/picadorusa
picadorbookroom.tumblr.com
Available wherever books and ebooks are sold.
Specimen Days Page 34