An intimate memoir portraying a life spent trying to describe the indescribable—from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist of The Hours and Day.Go 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, mo...

An intimate memoir portraying a life spent trying to describe the indescribable—from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist of The Hours and Day.Go 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, mo...

‘Unsparing and tender’ Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn ‘A brilliant novel from our most brilliant of writers’ Colum McCann, author of Apeirogon ‘A quietly stunning achievement’ Ocean Vuong, author of On Earth We’re Briefly GorgeousAs the world changes around them, a family weathers the storms of growing up, growing older, falling in and out of love, losing the things that are most precious – and learning to go on.April 5th, 20...

'It was the start of my second new life, in a city that had a spin of its own - a wilder orbit inside the earth's calm blue-green whirl. New York wasn't open to the hopelessness and lost purpose that drifted around lesser places . . . 'Meet Bobby, Jonathan and Clare. Three friends, three lovers, three ordinary people trying to make a place for themselves in the harsh and uncompromising world of the Seventies and Eighties.And as our threesome form a new kind...

Winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize and Pen Faulkner prize. Made into an Oscar-winning film, ‘The Hours’ is a daring and deeply affecting novel inspired by the life and work of Virginia Woolf.Exiled in Richmond in the 1920s, taken from her beloved Bloomsbury and watched by her husband Leonard, Virginia Woolf struggles to tame her rebellious mind and make a start on her new novel.In the brooding heat of 1940s Los Angeles, a young wife and mother yearns to escape the claustroph...

From the Pultizer Prize-winning author of ‘The Hours’, comes the story of a marriage thrown off course by a moment of mistaken identity.Peter Harris is forty-four, prosperous, the owner of a big New York apartment and a player in the contemporary art scene. He has been married to Rebecca for close to twenty years. Their marriage is sound, in the way marriages are. Peter might even describe himself as happy. But then Rebecca’s much younger brother Mizzy shows up for a visit. Beautif...

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of ‘The Hours’, time, technology and love are the central concerns of a provocative novel that calls to mind David Mitchell’s ‘Cloud Atlas’.Lucas, Catherine, Simon: three characters meet time and again in the three linked narratives that form ‘Specimen Days’. The first, a science fiction of the past, tells of a boy whose brother was ‘devoured’ by the machine he operated. The second is a noirish thriller set in our century, as a police psycholo...

Michael Cunningham (The Hours) sits down with Stacey D'Erasmo to discuss his novel Specimen Days. Isaiah Sheffer reads an excerpt.

A vision appears in the sky above wintry New York and seems to exert an influence over two brothers, in this luminous, compassionate novel from the author of ‘The Hours’.Barrett Meeks, having lost love yet again, is walking through Central Park when he is inspired to look up; in the sky he sees a pale, translucent light that seems to regard him in a distinctly godlike way. Barrett doesn’t believe in visions—or in God—but he can’t deny what he’s seen.At the same time, in nea...

This novel follows the Stassos family through four generations, as it is touched by ambition, love, violence, and the transforming effects of time.

'Will have you in stitches' The Irish Times'He's almost certainly not the hero you ordered, but he's the hero we need right now' Dave Gorman'I nearly stopped breathing twice as I was laughing so much. Glorious." Dom Joly'Probably the funniest thing I've read this year' Rufus HoundGet ready for the online adventures of one man who just wants to make friendsAnd...

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.