The Hours / Mrs. Dalloway - by Michael Cunningham & Virginia Woolf (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

Michael Cunningham brings together his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel with the masterpiece that inspired it, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway.

In The Hours, the acclaimed author Michael Cunningham draws inventively on the life and work of Virginia Woolf and the story of her novel, Mrs. Dalloway, to tell the story of a group of contemporary characters struggling with the conflicting claims of love and inheritance, hope and despair. In this edition, Cunningham brings his own Pulitzer Prize-winning novel together with Woolf's masterpiece, which has long been hailed as a groundbreaking work of literary fiction and one of the finest novels written in English.

The two novels, published side by side with a new introduction by Cunningham, display the extent of their affinity, and each illuminates new facets of the other in this joint volume. In his introduction, Cunningham re-creates the wonderment of his first encounter with Mrs. Dalloway at fifteen--as he writes, "I was lost. I was gone. I never recovered." With this edition, Cunningham allows us to disappear into the world of Woolf and into his own brilliant mind.

About the Author

Michael Cunningham is the author of several novels, including A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, The Hours (winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize), Specimen Days, and The Snow Queen, as well as A Wild Swan and Other Tales, a collection of short fiction. He lives in New York City and teaches at Yale University.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was a novelist, cultural critic, and publisher, and the author of such groundbreaking novels as To the Lighthouse, The Years, and The Waves. Woolf was one of the most important and innovative writers of the twentieth century, and her essays include the canonical feminist text A Room of One's Own.