An intimate memoir portraying a life spent trying to describe the indescribable, from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hours and DayGo ahead. Try using language to slit the skin of mortality to see what’s on the other side.At the age of three, Michael Cunningham began obsessively collecting the names of things: oak, Chevrolet, finch, tulip, Tupperware. . . . Each word rendered the world ever so slightly more understandable...

Beautiful and heartbreaking, comic and tragic, The Snow Queen once again proves that Michael Cunningham is one of the great novelists of his generationMichael Cunningham's luminous novel begins with a vision. It's November 2004. Barrett Meeks, having lost love yet again, is walking through Central Park when he is inspired to look up at the sky; there he sees a pale, translucent light that seems to regard him in a distinctly godlike way. Barrett doesn't bel...

In The Hours, Michael Cunningham—widely praised as one of the most gifted writers of his generation—draws inventively on the life and work of Virginia Woolf to tell the story of a group of contemporary characters struggling with the conflicting claims of love and inheritance, hope and despair. The narrative of Woolf ’s last days before her suicide early in World War II counterpoints the fictional stories of Richard, a famous poet whose life has been shadowed by his talented and tr...

NATIONAL BESTELLER • An “exquisite” (The Boston Globe) exploration of love and loss, the struggles and limitations of family life—and how we all must learn to live together and apart—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hours“The only problem with Michael Cunningham’s prose is that it ruins you for mere mortals’ work. He is the most elegant writer in America.”—The Washington PostNEW YORK TIMES...

Boyhood friends, Jonathan and Bobby meet up again in New York after college. Bobby moves in with Jonathan and his roommate, Clare, a veteran of the city’s erotic wars. Bobby and Clare fall in love, scuttling the plans of Jonathan, who is gay, to father Clare’s child. When Clare and Bobby have a baby, the three move to a small house upstate to raise “their” child together and, with an odd friend called Alice, create a new kind of family.

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 t...

Fairy tales for our times from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The HoursA poisoned apple and a monkey’s paw with the power to change fate; a girl whose extraordinarily long hair causes catastrophe; a man with one human arm and one swan’s wing; and a house deep in the forest, constructed of gumdrops and gingerbread, vanilla frosting and boiled sugar. In A Wild Swan and Other Tales, the people and the talismans of lands far, far away—the mythic...

Electric Literature is just that, electric - five great stories that grab you.Our Summer 2009 debut anthology features the first published excerpt from Michael Cunningham's (The Hours) forthcoming novel. This issue also features new fiction by Jim Shepard, T Cooper, Lydia Millet and Diana Wagman. These stories are charged with wit, incident, and emotional gravity right from the first sentence.

In 1950, Constantine (a Greek immigrant labourer) marries Mary (an Italian American girl) and together they produce three children. Over the years, a web of tangled longings, love, inadequacies and unfulfilled dreams unfolds as Mary and Constantine’s marriage fails, and their children leave to make unconventional families of their own. With the power of a Greek tragedy, the story builds to a heartbreaking crescendo.

A Haunting and Beautiful Ode to Provincetown, Cape Cod's Outermost TownIn Land's End, Michael Cunningham offers a magnificent and eloquent exploration of Provincetown, Massachusetts. This slender companion is perfect for a journey to the sandy, tide-washed tip of Cape Cod, offering enriching insights and an enjoyable read.Cunningham rambles through Provincetown, gracefully exploring the unusual geography, contrasting seasons, long history, and rich...

Meet Peter and Rebecca Harris: mid-forties denizens of Manhattan’s SoHo, nearing the apogee of committed careers in the arts—he a dealer, she an editor. With a spacious loft, a college-age daughter in Boston and lively friends, they are admirable, enviable contemporary urbanites with every reason, it seems, to be happy. Then Rebecca’s much younger lookalike brother, Ethan (known in the family as Mizzy, “the mistake”), shows up for a visit. A beautiful, beguiling twenty-three-year-old with ...

The world-famous masterpiece about a writer's obsessive pursuit of forbidden love by a Nobel Prize laureate.Translation by Michael Henry HeimPublished on the eve of World War I, a decade after Buddenbrooks had established Thomas Mann as a literary celebrity, Death in Venice tells the story of Gustave von Aschenbach, a successful but aging writer who follows his wanderlust to Venice in search of spiritual fulfillment that instead leads to h...