Michael Cunningham
MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM is the author of the novels A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, Specimen Days, By Nightfall, and The Snow Queen, as well as the collection A Wild Swan and Other Tales, and the nonfiction book Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and his work has appeared in The New Yorkerand The Best American Short Stories. The Hours was a New York Times bestseller, and the winner of both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Raised in Los Angeles, Michael Cunningham lives in New York City, and is a senior lecturer at Yale University.
All Books By Michael Cunningham
A Home at the End of the World
- By: Michael Cunningham
- Narrator: Colin Farrell
- Length: 12 hours 12 minutes
- Publisher: Macmillan Audio
- Publish date: July 01, 2004
- Language: English
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3.93(15920 ratings)
From Michael Cunningham, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours, comes the acclaimed novel of two boyhood friends A Home at the End of the World, now a feature film starring Colin Farrell and Dallas Roberts Jonathan.
There’s Jonathan, lonely, introspective, and unsure of himself; and Bobby, hip, dark, and inarticulate. 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. Then, 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, Alice, create a new kind of family.
A Home at the End of the World masterfully depicts the charged, fragile relationships of urban life today.
... Read moreA Home at the End of the World
- By: Michael Cunningham
- Narrator: Colin Farrell
- Length: 7 hours 46 minutes
- Publisher: Macmillan Audio
- Publish date: July 01, 2004
- Language: English
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3.93(15920 ratings)
From Michael Cunningham, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours, comes the acclaimed novel of two boyhood friends A Home at the End of the World, now a feature film starring Colin Farrell and Dallas Roberts Jonathan.
There’s Jonathan, lonely, introspective, and unsure of himself; and Bobby, hip, dark, and inarticulate. 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. Then, 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, Alice, create a new kind of family.
A Home at the End of the World masterfully depicts the charged, fragile relationships of urban life today.
... Read moreA Wild Swan
- By: Michael Cunningham
- Narrator: Lili Taylor
- Length: 2 hours 56 minutes
- Publisher: Macmillan Audio
- Publish date: November 10, 2015
- Language: English
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3.65(3688 ratings)
Fairy tales for our times from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours
A 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 figures of our childhoods and the source of so much of our wonder–are transformed by Michael Cunningham into stories of sublime revelation.
Here are the moments that our fairy tales forgot or deliberately concealed: the years after a spell is broken, the rapturous instant of a miracle unexpectedly realized, or the fate of a prince only half cured of a curse. The Beast stands ahead of you in line at the convenience store, buying smokes and a Slim Jim, his devouring smile aimed at the cashier. A malformed little man with a knack for minor acts of wizardry goes to disastrous lengths to procure a child. A loutish and lazy Jack prefers living in his mother’s basement to getting a job, until the day he trades a cow for a handful of magic beans.
Reimagined by one of the most gifted storytellers of his generation, our bedtime stories been this dark, this perverse, or this true.
Program contains music composed specifically for the audiobook by Billy Hough and his bandmates in GarageDogs. Billy Hough says: “The original piece ‘A Wild Swan’ was written as a gift to Michael, due to my incredibly strong reaction to hearing these beautiful stories for the first time. I enlisted the brilliant Lili Taylor to alternate the stories with me, and wrote a series of short pieces of music, for their eventual inclusion on this album. I wanted to use the music to illustrate the tension between the ancient and the modern, much in the same way Michael has done in the stories themselves.”
... Read moreBy Nightfall
- By: Michael Cunningham
- Narrator: Hugh Dancy
- Length: 7 hours 27 minutes
- Publisher: Macmillan Audio
- Publish date: September 28, 2010
- Language: English
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3.44(8073 ratings)
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 look-alike brother, Ethan (known in the family as Mizzy, “the mistake”), shows up for a visit. A beautiful, beguiling twenty-three-year-old with a history of drug problems, Mizzy is wayward, at loose ends, looking for direction. And in his presence, Peter finds himself questioning his artists, their work, his career–the entire world he has so carefully constructed.
Like his legendary, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Hours, Michael Cunningham’s masterly new novel is a heartbreaking look at the way we live now. Full of shocks and aftershocks, it makes us think and feel deeply about the uses and meaning of beauty and the place of love in our lives.
... Read moreSpecimen Days
- By: Michael Cunningham
- Narrator: Alan Cumming
- Length: 9 hours 44 minutes
- Publisher: Macmillan Audio
- Publish date: June 01, 2005
- Language: English
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3.6(4819 ratings)
A highly anticipated, bold new novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours–three linked visionary narratives set in the ever-mysterious, turbulent city of New York
In each section of Michael Cunningham’s new book, we encounter the same group of characters: a young boy, an older man, and a young woman. “In the Machine” is a ghost story which takes place at the height of the Industrial Revolution, as human beings confront the alienated 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 which 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 distance nor 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–a work of surpassing power and beauty by one of the most original and daring writers at work today.
Specimen Days
- By: Michael Cunningham
- Narrator: Alan Cumming
- Length: 4 hours 49 minutes
- Publisher: Macmillan Audio
- Publish date: June 01, 2005
- Language: English
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3.6(4819 ratings)
A highly anticipated, bold new novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours–three linked visionary narratives set in the ever-mysterious, turbulent city of New York
In each section of Michael Cunningham’s new book, we encounter the same group of characters: a young boy, an older man, and a young woman. “In the Machine” is a ghost story which takes place at the height of the Industrial Revolution, as human beings confront the alienated 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 which 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 distance nor 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–a work of surpassing power and beauty by one of the most original and daring writers at work today.
The Hours
- By: Michael Cunningham
- Narrator: Michael Cunningham
- Length: 6 hours 15 minutes
- Publisher: Macmillan Audio
- Publish date: October 01, 2003
- Language: English
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3.95(119063 ratings)
Winner of the Pulitzer prize, the Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and nominated for 9 Academy Awards, The Hours is now available on Unabridged CD.
Passionate, profound, and deeply moving, The Hours tells the story of three women: Clarissa Vaughan, who one New York morning goes about planning a party in honor of a beloved friend; Laura Brown, who in a 1950s Los Angeles suburb slowly begins to feel the constraints of a perfect family and home; and Virginia Woolf, recuperating with her husband in a London suburb and beginning to write Mrs. Dalloway. By the end of the novel, the stories have intertwined, and finally come together in an act of subtle and haunting grace, demonstrating Michael Cunningham’s deep empathy for his characters as well as the extraordinary resonance of his language.
... Read moreThe Snow Queen
- By: Michael Cunningham
- Narrator: Claire Danes
- Length: 6 hours 47 minutes
- Publisher: Macmillan Audio
- Publish date: May 06, 2014
- Language: English
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3.07(5686 ratings)
A darkly luminous new novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours
Michael 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 believe in visions–or in God–but he can’t deny what he’s seen.
At the same time, in the not-quite-gentrified Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, Tyler, Barrett’s older brother, a struggling musician, is trying–and failing–to write a wedding song for Beth, his wife-to-be, who is seriously ill. Tyler is determined to write a song that will be not merely a sentimental ballad but an enduring expression of love.
Barrett, haunted by the light, turns unexpectedly to religion. Tyler grows increasingly convinced that only drugs can release his creative powers. Beth tries to face mortality with as much courage as she can summon.
Cunningham follows the Meeks brothers as each travels down a different path in his search for transcendence. In subtle, lucid prose, he demonstrates a profound empathy for his conflicted characters and a singular understanding of what lies at the core of the human soul.
The Snow Queen, beautiful and heartbreaking, comic and tragic, proves again that Cunningham is one of the great novelists of his generation.
... Read more