Specimen Days

Specimen Days is a 2005 novel by American writer Michael Cunningham. It contains three stories: one that takes place in the past, one in the present, and one in the future. Each of the three stories depicts three central, semi-consistent character-types: a young boy, a man, and a woman. Walt Whitman's poetry is also a common thread in each of the three stories, and the title is from Whitman's own prose works. The film rights to the book have been optioned by American movie producer Scott Rudin, who has turned Cunningham's previous novel The Hours into an Academy Award-winning movie. Premise The novel is divided into what are essentially three discrete short stories, unified by common threads such as character names and types, story location (New York City), story themes (such as shared humanity), and the presence of Walt Whitman (whether through actual physical presence, quotation of his works via narrator or character, or the spirit of his ideas expressed through narrator or character). The first short story, "In the Machine", is a ghost story. "In the Machine" takes place in New York City during the Industrial Revolution, as human beings confront the alienating realities of the new machine age. The principal characters are Lucas (a disfigured young boy), Catherine (a young woman who was to marry Lucas' elder brother), and Simon (Lucas' recently deceased elder brother).