Michael Cunningham was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and grew up in California. He received his B.A. in English literature from Stanford University and his M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Iowa. His novel A Home at the End of the World was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1990 to wide acclaim. A film version was directed by Michael Mayer, and featured Colin Farrell, Robin Wright Penn, Dallas Roberts and Sissy Spacek.
Inverno (2024) Cynthia Zarin "Cynthia Zarin's Inverno is a dazzlingly beautiful, heartbreaking invocation of love, life, and the infinite ways in which the two intersect. Writers capable of producing fabulous prose are rare. Writers who bring a laser-sharp eye to the complexities of living in the world among others, and to the various collisions of past and present, are rare as well. A writer like Zarin, who can do both, is the rarest of all. I loved every line in this book."
The Glow (2023) Jessie Gaynor "Jessie Gaynor's wildly funny, laser-eyed novel is Jane Austen on steroids. It's that sharp, that wicked, that laceratingly true."
Victory City (2023) Salman Rushdie "It does not resemble any other novel I could name. A major accomplishment by one of our greatest living writers."
Blue Hunger (2023) Viola di Grado "Viola Di Grado is, most importantly, a powerful and original writer; the fact that she also writes, movingly and with complexity, about members of the LGBT population, renders her work all the more singular."
To Paradise (2022) Hanya Yanagihara "TO PARADISE is a transcendent, visionary novel of stunning scope and depth. A novel so layered, so rich, so relevant, so full of the joys and terrors - the pure mystery - of human life, is not only rare, it's revolutionary."
Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket (2021) Hilma Wolitzer "Hilma Wolitzer sees the miraculous, and the tragic, in modest lives and domestic particulars - wonders that might pass as ordinary events to the untrained eye. She magnifies the world. She insists, in one gorgeous sentence after another, that there's no such thing as a usual hour, let alone a usual day."
Alec (2021) William di Canzio "Just when it began to seem that I couldn’t read E. M. Forster’s Maurice one more time, as much as I love it, here’s Alec, William di Canzio’s brilliant reimagining of Forster’s classic. Alec extends Maurice, delivers it to us intact but refreshed and reconsidered. I, for one, am extremely grateful."
The Delivery (2021) Peter Mendelsund "Peter Mendelsund's The Delivery is not only truly original, and gorgeously written, it shines a light on a person, a population, generally invisible to all but themselves, which is among a novel's more profound purposes. It's a remarkable book."
What Happens at Night (2020) Peter Cameron "Peter Cameron’s What Happens at Night is a surreal, funny, heartbreaking story about love and mortality. Cameron’s sense of balance between the comic and the catastrophic, between cynicism and sincerity, is astonishing. This book reminds me of nothing else I’ve ever read, which is high praise indeed."
Apeirogon (2020) Colum McCann "Nothing like any book you've ever read ... Think of discovering an entirely unprecedented, and profoundly true, narrative form. Think about feeling that the very idea of the novel, of what it can be and what it's capable of containing, has been expanded, forever ... All I can really tell you is, read McCann's book. It's an important book."
The Distance Home (2018) Paula Saunders "In Paula Saunders’ The Distance Home, a family’s story traces the intricate, often subterranean lines that connect damage to redemption, creation to dissolution, and the everyday to the eternal, just to name several of its moving and startling aspects. It’s a true, and rare, accomplishment."
Dept. of Speculation (2014) Jenny Offill "Dept. of Speculation resembles no book I've read before. If I tell you that it's funny, and moving, and true; that it's as compact and mysterious as a neutron; that it tells a profound story of love and parenthood while invoking (among others) Keats, Kafka, Einstein, Russian cosmonauts, and advice for the housewife of 1897, will you please simply believe me, and read it?"
Room (2010) Emma Donoghue "Potent, darkly beautiful, and revelatory."
Matrimony (2007) Joshua Henkin "In the tradition of John Cheever and Richard Yates ... a novel about love, hope, delusion, and the intricate ways in which time's passage raises us up even as it grinds us down. It's a beautiful book. Here's to its brilliant future."
The Confessions of Max Tivoli (2004) Andrew Sean Greer "Every once in a great while, a truly original voice springs up, seemingly out of nowhere, and tells us a story unlike anything we've ever heard before. Andrew Sean Greer is a devastating new writer, and The Confessions of Max Tivoli marks the beginning of what I suspect will be a significant and lasting career."
(b.1952)
