Specimen Days

Specimen Days

by Michael Cunningham

I’m Kim Alexander and this is a Fiction Nation minute. The book is Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham.

Three related short novels, wildly different in tone and substance, but all taking place in New York, and all involve some incarnation of a man, a woman and a young boy, and the poetry of Walt Whitman. The first is a straight up ghost story set at the start of the industrial revolution. What are these new machines? They didn’t exists, and suddenly they run our lives. It seems to the boy that the spirits of the dead must be trying to come through them, and not in a good way. In Specimen Days the boy is practically unable to do anything but quote Leaves of Grass. For the working poor of early New York, returning to the grass after death must have seemed like a good trade off for life in the machine. Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham. I’m Kim Alexander on Book Radio, SiriusXM Channel 80.


I’m Kim Alexander and this is a Fiction Nation minute. The book is Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham.

Three very different short novels, all set in New York, set in part to the words of Walt Whitman. The second is a crime thriller that absolutely set my hair on end. Cat is the person you call at the police station just before something terrible happens. In this case, she missed a sign, and the Whitman-quoting boy blew up a passerby. Then others start to call. Do they know each other? Is it that most frightening possibility — a random act? Is it the beginning of the end? Cat’s struggle to make sense of the desperate children who call her and her growing awareness of a world on the brink kept this story on my mind through more than one sleepless night. The three short novels in Specimen Days were all pretty extraordinary reading, but this one, The Children’s Crusade, I won’t forget it soon. Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham. I’m Kim Alexander on Book Radio, SiriusXM Channel 80.


I’m Kim Alexander and this is a Fiction Nation minute. The book is Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham.

Three novellas related by the characters of a man, woman and young boy, and the words of Walt Whitman. The third, Like Beauty, is a gentler one than the thriller that came second, and far different and more hopeful in tone. It’s actually a science fiction story, in which New York has been remade into a theme part, where the animatronic inhabitants will mug and assault you if you have a ticket. The story follows one such Pinocchio, an actor slash thug slash robot who teams up with an immigrant, an actual alien, and travels across a poisoned America, learning to be a real boy. It’s always interesting to me when a serious novelist writes genre fiction, and in Specimen Days, Cunningham respects the form and uses it to ask the basic question: what does it mean to be human?  In these three novellas, set at the start of the industrial revolution, the end of contemporary America, and sometime in the exhausted future, the answer is always the same: well, I’m not going to tell you! Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham. I’m Kim Alexander on Book Radio, SiriusXM Channel 80.


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