Books by Michael Cunningham

A celebration of the style, pride, and verve of African American women pride, and their hats, in magnificent photographs and engaging essays.

Published on the eve of World War I, a decade after Buddenbrooks had established Thomas Mann as a literary celebrity, Death in Venice tells the story of Gustav von Aschenbach, a successful but aging writer who follows his wanderlust to Venice in search of spiritual fulfillment that instead leads to his erotic doom.

In the decaying city, besieged by an unnamed epidemic, he becomes obsessed with an exquisite Polish boy, Tadzio. "It is a story of the voluptuousness of doom," Mann wrote. "But the problem I had especially in mind was that of the artist’s dignity."

Prophetic poet Walt Whitman presides over each interlinked episode in a visionary novel set in the city of New York, featuring the same group of characters--a young boy, an older man, and a young woman.

David Stark, an adolescent and mainstay of a family of women nearing physical or emotional collapse, hitchhikes from Southern California to San Francisco to locate a wandering sister and encounters adulthood.

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 upstate to raise "their" child together and create a new kind of family. A Home at the End of the World masterfully depicts the charged, fragile relationships of urban life today.

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 upstate to raise "their" child together and create a new kind of family. A Home at the End of the World masterfully depicts the charged, fragile relationships of urban life today.

Friends since the age of thirteen, Jonathan and Bobby live troubled lives that eventually take them to New York, where they meet the romantically troubled Clare, and the three embark on a new life together. Reissue. 250,000 first printing. (A Warner Bros. film, written by Michael Cunningham, directed by Michael Mayer, releasing July 2004, starring Colin Farrell, Sissy Spacek, & Robin Wright Penn) (General Fiction)

Friends since the age of thirteen, Jonathan and Bobby live troubled lives that eventually take them to New York, where they meet the romantically troubled Clare, and the three embark on a new life together.

Michael Cunningham's critically acclaimed novel, which is inspired by Virginia Woolf's MRS. DALLOWAY, tells three simultaneous stories. One is about Virginia Woolf while she is writing the novel in the mid-1920s. In another, a woman reading MRS. DALLOWAY in 1949 fights off despair. In the third, a woman named Clarissa (whose nickname is "Mrs. Dalloway") prepares a party for a friend in the late 1990s. The main action of each part of the novel takes place over the course of one day--as MRS. DALLOWAY does. A New York Times Notable Book for 1998.

David Hare's screen adaptation of Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. In extraordinary and ingenious ways, the film shows how a single day - and the novel "Mrs Dalloway" - inextricably link the lives of three women. The film stars Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman and Julianne Moore.

A photographic tribute to the spirit and achievements of African-American women of merit profiles fifty women over the age of fifty who have distinguished themselves in the corporate, political, or entertainment worlds, in a volume that includes profiles of such individuals as Ruby Dee, Eleanor Holmes Norton, and Marion Wright Edelman.

A fascinating odyssey to Provincetown, Massachusetts, offers an evocative portrait of the rugged beauty and rich historical significance of the seaside town as well as the impressive array of artists and writers--including Tennessee Williams, Eugene O'Neill, Mark Rothko, and Edmund Wilson--that made the town an artistic mecca.

In this celebration of one of America's oldest towns (incorporated in 1720), Michael Cunningham, author of the best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning The Hours, brings us Provincetown, one of the most idiosyncratic and extraordinary towns in the United States, perched on the sandy tip at the end of Cape Cod.

Provincetown, eccentric, physically remote, and heartbreakingly beautiful, has been amenable and intriguing to outsiders for as long as it has existed. "It is the only small town I know of where those who live unconventionally seem to outnumber those who live within the prescribed bounds of home and licensed marriage, respectable job, and biological children," says Cunningham. "It is one of the places in the world you can disappear into. It is the Morocco of North America, the New Orleans of the north."

He first came to the place more than 20 years ago, falling in love with the haunted beauty of its seascape and the rambunctious charm of its denizens. Although Provincetown is primarily known as a summer mecca of stunning beaches, quirky shops, and wild nightlife, as well as a popular destination for gay men and lesbians, it is also a place of deep and enduring history, artistic and otherwise. Few towns have attracted such an impressive array of artists and writers (from Tennessee Williams to Eugene O'Neill, Mark Rothko to Robert Motherwell) who, like Cunningham, were attracted to this finger of land because it was different, nonjudgmental, the perfect place to escape to; to be rescued, healed, reborn, or simply to live in peace. As we follow Cunningham on his various excursions through Provincetown and its surrounding landscape, we are drawn into its history, its mysteries, its peculiarities; places you won't read about in any conventional travel guide.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours presents a definitive compilation of poetry by Walt Whitman, bringing together extracts from Leaves of Grass and Specimen Days, along with an incisive introduction to the poet's work, its influence on American literature, and its significance in terms of Cunningham's work.

From the time of Marco Polo's journeys and the legendary Silk Road, the ancient cultures of Asia have fascinated and enriched the West. Now, at the end of the twentieth century, interest in Asian art and thought has never been more intense. Presented here are the highlights of the Cleveland Museum of Art's celebrated collection of Asian art, the range and quality of which have been made possible by a steadfast commitment that dates from the founding of the museum in 1913. Demonstrating a breadth of vision that was unusual for the time, the museum sought not only the arts of China and Japan, then beginning to acquire a presence in America's young museums, but also those of Korea, India, and Southeast Asia. In the intervening three-quarters of a century this interest was cultivated by a series of generous collectors and gifted curators, including the museum's third director, Sherman E. Lee, who gradually built one of the premier collections of Asian art in the West. Masterworks of Asian Art presents for the first time more than one hundred of the finest objects in full color, including Chinese paintings and textiles, traditional Japanese ink-paintings and medieval stoneware, and superb examples of Cambodian and early Indian stone sculpture. The commentaries reflect the latest scholarship in the field, and an introduction by Michael R. Cunningham, curator of Japanese and Korean Art, recounts the history of the collection's formation in detail.

This short novel, originally published in 1940, is about an American in Paris who, at the home of a friend, encounters an Irish couple and their falcon, with whom they have an ambiguous relationship that centers on a power struggle. THE PILGRIM HAWK is considered a classic novella, and has often been compared to Faulkner's THE BEAR--not in terms of content but for its quality. The introduction was written by Michael Cunningham.

From intricate braids to relaxed, flowing tresses to dreadlocks to Afros, black women have literally used their heads to express themselves and showcase their ideals of beauty. In more than fifty gorgeous photographs accompanied by vivid, personal narratives, QUEENS explores the fascination with hair and beauty that has long been a part of African American culture.

A host of women tell their personal hair stories and female hairdressers explain why they devote their lives to making black woman feel like royalty. A gallery of portraits taken at black hair shows throughout the country is juxtaposed with photographs taken in Africa, bringing to light the almost uncanny connection between the innovative 'dos of contemporary African America and traditional African styles.

“When we found out the baby was a girl, my husband said,
‘Okay, a girl. Alright, that means we’re going to have hair issues.’”
–Lynn Godfrey

“I set my hair money aside like it’s a bill...It’s like paying the phone bill, the electricity bill, the gas bill. I don’t play about my hair.
–Nitiya Barry

“When I see myself in an afro I feel more powerful than when
I wear my hair permed and straight. I feel like I can take on
the world. –Thoundia Bickam

A natural sequel to Crowns, by turns moving and funny, QUEENS is the ultimate all-occasion gift book, perfect for Christmas, Kwanzaa, Mother’s Day, and birthdays.

Prophetic poet Walt Whitman presides over each interlinked episode in a visionary novel set in the city of New York, featuring the same group of characters--a young boy, an older man, and a young woman--that range from "In the Machine," which takes place at the height of the Industrial Revolution, through the twenty-first-century "Children's Crusade," to "Like Beauty," set in a city of the future. Simultaneous.

“The minute you step out your door, everything in Harlem is in your face. There’s a beauty and a poetry in all that . . .You can’t feel Harlem if you’re driving by. But if you walk, you’ll see all kinds of thing.”
—Lana Turner


“ ‘A spa in Harlem? You really want to open a spa in Harlem?’ That’s what everybody asked my husband and me. A lot of people flat out said, ‘It ain’t gonna work.’ ”
—Dr. Cynthia Grace


“In February of 2000, I was on a beach in Mexico with my daughter, Lise. I said, ‘You know what, Lise? I’m moving to Harlem.’ She said, ‘You’re what?’ I said, ‘I’m moving to Harlem.’ She said, ‘Can we finish our vacation first?’ ”
—Clara Villarosa

A voyage to South America undertaken by English tourists parallels with a young woman's painful journey from childish naivete to maturity.

In the Washington Square area of New York City in the late nineteenth century, devastating betrayals by both her father and her lover leave shy and fragile Catherine Sloper permanently scarred. Reprint.

Those familiar with "Clement Wood's Unabridged Rhyming Dictionary", the standard since the 1930s, will find "Webster's New World Rhyming Dictionary" a thoroughly revitalized old friend.

A timeless collection of short stories about an imaginary small town, unified by the presence of Winesburg Eagle reporter George Willard, Winesburg, Ohio is, as H.L. Mencken said upon it's publication in 1919, "vivid, so full of insight, so shiningly life-like and glowing, that the book is lifted into a category all its own."

Presented here by the leading lights of modern American letters, Winesburg, Ohio reverberates with the passion of both Sherwood Anderson and the many writers whom he has influenced.