’Ctmningham’s latest novel--actually, three novellas---is breathtaking.., impossible to put down, so dazzling is its prose, so complex are the ideas it wrestles with and so generous is its vantage point... It is, in three daring swoops, a poetic meditation on what it means to be human, a cautionary tale about the separation of progress from morality and an eloquent call to rebellion against the powers that be. Walt Whitman, in all of his bearded amplitude, must be smiling?’

--Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

In Specimen Days, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours, Michael Cunningham, celebrates America in all its grime and glory, its poetry and its terror, from the Industrial Revolution to a post-apocalyptic future. As a man, a woman, and a boy reappear in different guises in different centuries, the novel itself moves from a Victorian ghost story, to a contemporary psychological police thriller, and finally a futuristic love story. Featuring Walt Whitman and a metamorphosing NewYork City, Specimen Days is a breathtakingly beautiful celebration of the transforming power of love and art through the centuries.