|
|
Michael Cunningham
|
|
|
|
Names Index:
A B
C D
E F
G H
I J
K L
M N
O P
Q R
S T
U V
W X
Y Z
| Authors
Index | Scholars
Index |
|
 The
Hours by
Michael Cunningham
The Hours
is both an homage to Virginia Woolf and very much its own
creature. Even as Michael Cunningham brings his literary idol back
to life, he intertwines her story with those of two more
contemporary women. One gray suburban London morning in 1923,
Woolf awakens from a dream that will soon lead to Mrs.
Dalloway. In the present, on a beautiful June day in
Greenwich Village, 52-year-old Clarissa Vaughan is planning a
party for her oldest love, a poet dying of AIDS. And in Los
Angeles in 1949, Laura Brown, pregnant and unsettled, does her
best to prepare for her husband's birthday, but can't seem to stop
reading Woolf. These women's lives are linked both by the 1925
novel and by the few precious moments of possibility each keeps
returning to. Clarissa is to eventually realize:
There's just this for consolation: an hour here
or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations,
to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined....
Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than
anything, for more.
As Cunningham moves between the three women, his
transitions are seamless. One early chapter ends with Woolf
picking up her pen and composing her first sentence, "Mrs.
Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." The next
begins with Laura rejoicing over that line and the fictional
universe she is about to enter. Clarissa's day, on the other hand,
is a mirror of Mrs. Dalloway's--with, however, an appropriate
degree of modern beveling as Cunningham updates and elaborates his
source of inspiration. Clarissa knows that her desire to give her
friend the perfect party may seem trivial to many. Yet it seems
better to her than shutting down in the face of disaster and
despair. Like its literary inspiration, The Hours is a hymn
to consciousness and the beauties and losses it perceives. It is
also a reminder that, as Cunningham again and again makes us
realize, art belongs to far more than just "the world of
objects." --Kerry Fried
 Home
at the End of the World by
Michael Cunningham
Michael Cunningham's celebrated novel is the
story of two boyhood friends: 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 in upstate New York to raise
"their" child together and, with an old 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.
|
|
In a world where The Hours can win the
Pulitzer, are things actually getting better for gay and lesbian
writers?
By Michael Bronski, Boston Phoenix, June,
1999
Excerpt:
Early on the afternoon of April 12, a
joyful buzz spread through the queer literary community: Michael
Cunningham's The Hours had just been awarded the 1998
Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Earlier that month it had been a
runner-up for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and it had
also won the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Publishing Triangle's
Ferro/Grumley Award for gay male fiction. But the Pulitzer? That
was the big time. In the 81-year history of the prize,
Cunningham was the first openly gay writer to win in the fiction
category...
|
|
For Open City
Magazine #6
By Michael Cunningham
Excerpt:
This is the story of Angel Segarra, a Puerto
Rican kid from the South Bronx who became Angie Xtravaganza,
doyenne of the drag world made briefly famous by Jennie
Livingston’s acclaimed 1990 documentary, Paris Is Burning...
|
|
|
|
Names Index:
A B
C D
E F
G H
I J
K L
M N
O P
Q R
S T
U V
W X
Y Z
| Authors
Index | Scholars
Index |
|
|
