Specimen Days: A Novel

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.

"[Specimen Days] is a love song of a novel, rich and melancholy and overflowing with smartness."—The Boston Globe

"It is his unique moral vision that successfully hinges three distinct narrative panels into a triptych of unified beauty. It's what raises his individual stories out of their genres into the glorious realm of art . . . Big, haunting, beautiful."—Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Stunning . . . It is a rich reading experience, going from the brutal factory scenes to the thriller of the middle section, and then on to the brave new world of the final section. Cunningham has made something substantively and stylistically bold out of these stories, keeping his many fires stoked and pulling the parts together as a brilliant whole."—The Seattle Times

"Like Whitman, Cunningham too sings America, in all its grime and glory . . . and Specimen Days is a book of wonders."—The Times Picayune (New Orleans)

"These three novellas give loose rein to his playful genius for description and rollicking plot."—Ethan Canin, The Washington Post Book Review

”In his first novel since The Hours, Michael Cunningham explores the unsettling effects of the industrial age. Splendid prose in a mesmerizing tale that tweaks our standard measures of time."—Chicago Tribune

"Brilliantly conceived, empathic, darkly humorous, and gorgeously rendered, Cunningham's galvanizing novel about the quest for justice and freedom, the parameters of the soul, the hunger for beauty, and the fluid interface between the natural and the engineered is a genuine literary event. Y.A.: The magnetic characters and edgy action will carry teens through."—Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

"Engaging Walt Whitman as his muse (and borrowing the name of Whitman's 1882 autobiography for his title), Cunningham weaves a captivating, strange, and extravagant novel of human progress and social decline. Like his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Hours, the novel tells three stories separated in time. But here, the stage is the same (the 'glittering, blighted' city of Manhattan), the actors mirror each other (a deformed, Whitman-quoting boy, Luke, is a terrorist in one story and a teenage prophet in another; a world-weary woman, Catherine, is a would-be bride and an alien; and a handsome young man, Simon, is a ghost, a business man, and an artificial human) and weighty themes (of love and fear, loss and connection, violence and poetry) reverberate with increasing power. 'In the Machine,' set during the Industrial Revolution, tells the story of 12-year-old Luke as he falls in love with his dead brother's girlfriend, Catherine, and becomes convinced that the ghost of his brother, Simon, lives inside the iron works machine that killed him. The suspenseful 'The Children's Crusade' explores love and maternal instinct via a thrilleresque plot, as Cat, a black forensic psychologist, draws away from her rich, white and younger lover, Simon, and toward a spooky, deformed boy who's also a member of a global network committed to random acts of terror. And in 'Like Beauty,' Simon, a 'simulo', Catareen, a lizard-like alien, and Luke, an adolescent prophet, strike out for a new life in a postapocalyptic world. With its narrative leaps and self-conscious flights into the transcendent, Cunningham's fourth novel sometimes seems ready to collapse under the weight of its lavishness and ambition—but thrillingly, it never does. This is daring, memorable fiction."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)