CUNNINGHAM, Michael. The Hours. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2015.

Octavo. Full deep brown leather. Spine with three raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. Gilt design, lettering and fore-edges. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. 230 pp. Signed Collector's Edition. Part of the Easton Press Signed Modern Classics series. Signed by the author on the special signature page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity, edition card, and bookplate adhered to front endpaper. Originally published New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.

Michael Cunningham (b. 1952) grew up in Pasadena and Los Angeles, studied at Stanford and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, and published his first novel in 1984. The Hours, his third, was published in 1998, won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1999, and was subsequently adapted into a film whose principal performances would become among the most discussed of the decade. The novel has not diminished in the years since. It remains one of the most formally accomplished American novels of the late twentieth century, and the most considered act of literary homage in the contemporary tradition.

The novel works in three interlocking strands across three periods and three cities. Virginia Woolf is in Richmond in 1923, staying with her husband Leonard at Hogarth House during a period of forced convalescence, beginning to write a novel — the novel that will become Mrs. Dalloway — while conducting an interior argument with herself about sanity, creativity, and whether the life she is living is the life she was meant to have. Laura Brown is in Los Angeles in 1949, a young wife and mother reading Mrs. Dalloway on what seems an ordinary morning — her husband's birthday — and discovering in the book a disturbance she cannot name. Clarissa Vaughan is in Greenwich Village in the late 1990s, stepping out to buy flowers for a party she is giving that evening for her closest friend Richard, a poet dying of AIDS-related illness, who has called her Mrs. Dalloway since they were young.

The three strands are linked by the novel they all inhabit, which is both Mrs. Dalloway and Cunningham's own — a palimpsest in which Woolf's themes of consciousness, time, mortality, and the gap between inner and outer life are re-examined through characters who have absorbed her in different ways at different moments of their lives. The prose matches Woolf's for its attentiveness to the texture of experience, and the final convergence of the three narratives is managed with a precision that earns every emotion it produces. Stephen Daldry's 2002 film adaptation, with a screenplay by David Hare, starred Nicole Kidman (Academy Award for Best Actress), Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, and Ed Harris.

Near fine. Some very faint spotting along gilt edges; otherwise fine throughout.

This book is currently not on display in store. If you would like more information or to arrange a viewing, please contact: [email protected]

Catalogue Number: HH000545