A Wild Swan, Michael Cunningham
A Wild Swan, Michael Cunningham
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A Wild Swan
And Other Tales

Author: Michael Cunningham

Narrator: Lili Taylor, Billy Hough

Unabridged: 2 hr 56 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 11/10/2015


Synopsis

Fairy tales for our times from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hours

A poisoned apple and a monkey's paw with the power to change fate; a girl whose extraordinarily long hair causes catastrophe; a man with one human arm and one swan's wing; and a house deep in the forest, constructed of gumdrops and gingerbread, vanilla frosting and boiled sugar. In A Wild Swan and Other Tales, the people and the talismans of lands far, far away—the mythic figures of our childhoods and the source of so much of our wonder—are transformed by Michael Cunningham into stories of sublime revelation.
Here are the moments that our fairy tales forgot or deliberately concealed: the years after a spell is broken, the rapturous instant of a miracle unexpectedly realized, or the fate of a prince only half cured of a curse. The Beast stands ahead of you in line at the convenience store, buying smokes and a Slim Jim, his devouring smile aimed at the cashier. A malformed little man with a knack for minor acts of wizardry goes to disastrous lengths to procure a child. A loutish and lazy Jack prefers living in his mother's basement to getting a job, until the day he trades a cow for a handful of magic beans.
Reimagined by one of the most gifted storytellers of his generation, our bedtime stories been this dark, this perverse, or this true.

Program contains music composed specifically for the audiobook by Billy Hough and his bandmates in GarageDogs. Billy Hough says: "The original piece 'A Wild Swan' was written as a gift to Michael, due to my incredibly strong reaction to hearing these beautiful stories for the first time. I enlisted the brilliant Lili Taylor to alternate the stories with me, and wrote a series of short pieces of music, for their eventual inclusion on this album. I wanted to use the music to illustrate the tension between the ancient and the modern, much in the same way Michael has done in the stories themselves."

About Michael Cunningham

MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM is the author of the novels A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, Specimen Days, By Nightfall, and The Snow Queen, as well as the collection A Wild Swan and Other Tales, and the nonfiction book Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and his work has appeared in The New Yorker and The Best American Short Stories. The Hours was a New York Times bestseller, and the winner of both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Raised in Los Angeles, Michael Cunningham lives in New York City, and is a senior lecturer at Yale University.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Althea on February 09, 2016

Fairy tale retellings are one of my 'things,' so I had to pick this up when I came across it on the library shelf. I haven't read anything else by this Pulitzer Prize-winning author, so I can't compare this to his other writings. The stories collected here are very consistent in 'feel' throughout. Ea......more

Goodreads review by Maciek on December 11, 2016

Michael Cunningham is the author of The Hours, a book inspired by Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway which won him the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and was later adapted into a successful movie. I have never read the book nor seen the film, though I really enjoyed the musical score by Philip Glass, which......more

Goodreads review by Dagio_maya on September 08, 2018

“Lentamente il principe si volta offrendole un sorriso lascivo e bestiale; un sorriso predatore e famelico. Nonostante l’avvenenza, qualcosa nel suo volto non quadra. Gli occhi restano selvatici. La bocca sembra ancora adatta a squarciare la gola di un cervo. Potrebbe quasi essere il fratello più......more

Goodreads review by Daphne on December 07, 2015

This is one of the most enjoyable collection of short stories I've read since Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. If anything, the characters here where written with more impact and depth. Carter is a master at ambiance, but Cunningham mastered character creation in short form here......more


Quotes

Michael Cunningham writes some of the most beautiful prose in contemporary American fiction. —Wendy Smith, The Daily Beast

Taylor and Hough dramatize these newfangled tales with youthful charm and subtle savagery, easily swinging from the author’s gentle humor into darker recesses. —Publishers Weekly

Over and over, Taylor and Hough offer up the prettiest rose for us to sniff and at just the right moment, let the thorn prick us. Their pacing is immaculate. —AudioFile Magazine, winner of an Earphones Award

“Modern, wicked, dark and accompanied by original music, these are enhanced by the narrators, who veer between charm and ferociousness.”--Cleveland Plain Dealer


Awards

  • Slate Best Books of the Year
  • Slate Book Review Best Books of the Year
  • NPR Best Book of the Year