"As a writer, I spend my days trying to come up with one sentence after another, in the ongoing attempt to tell a story. By late afternoon, when I’m finished for the day, it’s time for someone else to tell me a story.
Thanks for that, Audible.
There’s no particular theme to the five I’ve chosen. My interests run pretty wide. These, however, are five that have been especially meaningful to me. I could easily have offered a lot more." —Michael Cunningham, author of Day.
Save Michael's list to your library collections.
I’m a huge fan of Radiolab. They seem never to choose a less-than-compelling topic. I’ve listened to at least a hundred episodes. Among my favorites: "Remembering Oliver Sacks," "Colors," "Words," "Elements," and "Apocalyptical," though I could easily name, well, almost all of them.
Ghost stories should be heard, preferably in a group, not read in solitude. Stephen Fry is a great reader. I sometimes bring him out (so to speak) at parties. Among the highlights: Charlotte Riddell’s “The Open Door,” M. R. James’s “Lost Hearts,” and Algernon Blackwood’s “The Empty House.”
The audio version of Lincoln in the Bardo actually did justice to the genius of the novel, by means of dozens of different narrators for the book’s avalanche of characters. It added to my appreciation of the book, which, when I read it, had seemed impossible to expand upon.
Thirteen episodes might sound like a lot. It isn’t. Parton fully emerges as the icon that she is and, by the end of episode 13, you see that her life story is a mirror of the American story—the better parts of it, along with some of its deeper shadows.
At the height of the pandemic, when my husband and I were staying in a remote house, Juliet Stevenson’s reading of Sense and Sensibility was literally a lifeline not only to the larger world but to the idea that the world, having survived so much already, might, just might, continue.
About Michael
Michael Cunningham is a novelist, screenwriter, and educator. His novel The Hours received the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1999. He has taught at Columbia University and Brooklyn College. He is currently a professor in the practice at Yale University.
