PositiveThe Pittsburgh Post-GazetteMichael Cunningham's new novel is extraordinary. It is strange and unusual and awkward to describe ... In Specimen Days, Cunningham pays homage to another writer, Walt Whitman, that exuberant, expansive, quintessentially American poet ...works with three even more diverse narratives, each taking place in a different century and each focused on a trio of characters — all denizens of New York City, all, perhaps, variations of each other ...all certainly too much ambition, too much freight for a novel to bear, and yet in Cunningham's hands, this audacity pays off grandly...enormous writing skills, from the dreamy elegy of a haunted boy trapped in the industrial inferno, to a fast-paced, suspenseful urban thriller, to a fascinating science fiction love story ...Cunningham has produced a book equally embracing and celebratory.
Jhumpa Lahiri
RaveThe Pittsburgh Post-GazetteLike her subtle, precise stories, this novel moves quietly, eloquently across its central arc from the birth of a son to the death of the father … Lahiri's narrative moves lightly through time, landing on selected years, as one would move through the pages of a photo album. Her point of view shuttles between the parents and their son, and is richly sympathetic to both generations … In this post-modern era, culture fragments and ties of blood disappoint. Lahiri honors a bond stronger, and more transcendent than either of those.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
