Michael Cunningham has 9 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 15 narrators, with an average listener rating of 5★ across 75 ratings. The most-rated is Stop Caretaking the Borderline or Narcissist.
Stop Caretaking the Borderline or Narcissist
Summary
People with borderline or narcissistic personality disorders have a serious mental illness that primarily affects their intimate, personal, and family relationships. Often they appear to be normally functioning at work and in public interactions, and narcissists may even be highly effective, in the short term, in some work or social situations. However, in intimate relationships, they can be emotional, aggressive, demeaning, illogical, paranoid, accusing, and controlling - in the extreme. Their ability to function normally or pleasantly can suddenly change in an instant, like flipping a switch. These negative behaviors don't happen once in a while; they happen almost continuously in their intimate relationships - most often and especially with their caretaker family member. Here, Margalis Fjelstad describes how people get into a caretaker role with a borderline or narcissist, and how they can get out. Caretakers give up their sense of self to become who and what the borderline or narcissist needs them to be. This compromises the caretaker's self-esteem, distorts their thinking processes, and locks them into a victim-persecutor-rescuer pattern with the borderline or narcissist. The book looks at the underlying rules and expectations in these relationships and shows caretakers how to move themselves out of these rigid interactions and into a healthier, more productive, and positive lifestyle - with or without the borderline/narcissistic partner or family member. It describes how to get out of destructive interactions with the borderline or narcissist and how to take new, more effective actions to focus on personal wants, needs, and life goals while allowing the borderline or narcissist to take care of themselves. It presents a realistic, yet compassionate, attitude toward the self-destructive nature of these relationships, and gives real-life examples of how individuals have let go of their caretaker behaviors with creative and effective solutions.
©2014 Margalis Fjelstad (P)2016 Audiobooks.com Publishing
The Hours
Summary
Pulitzer Prize, Fiction, 1999 The Hours is the story of three women: Clarissa Vaughan, a beloved friend of ailing poet Richard Brown, who one fine New York morning goes about planning a party in his honor; Laura Brown, who in a 1950's Los Angeles suburb slowly begins to feel the constraints of a perfect family and home; and Virginia Woolf, recuperating with her husband in a London suburb, and beginning to write Mrs. Dalloway. By the end of the novel, the stories intertwine in remarkable ways, and finally come together in an act of subtle and haunting grace.
©1998 Michael Cunningham (P)2003 Audio Renaissance, a division of Holtzbrinck Publishers, LLC
A Home at the End of the World
Summary
Michael Cunningham's celebrated novel is the story of two boyhood friends: Jonathan, lonely, introspective, and unsure of himself; and Bobby, hip, dark, and inarticulate. In New York after college, Bobby moves in with Jonathan and his roommate, Clare, a veteran of the city's erotic wars. Bobby and Clare fall in love, scuttling the plans of Jonathan, who is gay, to father Clare's child. Then, when Clare and Bobby have a baby, the three move to a small house upstate to raise "their" child together and create a new kind of family. A Home at the End of the World masterfully depicts the charged, fragile relationships of urban life today.
©1990 Michael Cunningham (P)2004 Audio Renaissance, a division of Holtzbrinck Publishers, LLC
By Nightfall
Summary
Meet Peter and Rebecca Harris: mid-40s denizens of Manhattan’s SoHo, nearing the apogee of committed careers in the arts—he a dealer, she an editor. With a spacious loft, a college-age daughter in Boston and lively friends, they are admirable, enviable contemporary urbanites with every reason, it seems, to be happy. Then Rebecca’s much younger lookalike brother, Ethan (known in the family as Mizzy, “the mistake”), shows up for a visit. A beautiful, beguiling 23-year-old with a history of drug problems, Mizzy is wayward, at loose ends, looking for direction. And in his presence, Peter finds himself questioning his artists, their work, his career—the entire world he has so carefully constructed. By Nightfall is a heartbreaking look at the way we live now. Full of shocks and aftershocks, it makes us think and feel deeply about the uses and meaning of beauty and the place of love in our lives.
©2010 Michael Cunningham (P)2010 HarperCollins Canada
The Hours
Summary
Winner of the Gold Award for Best Drama in the New York Festivals Radio Awards 2018. A BBC radio adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Michael Cunningham, inspired by Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. Three separate women, living in different locations and eras, are linked by their passion for Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs Dalloway. As they each live through a Tuesday in June, their thoughts and experiences mirror each other and become interwoven. In Richmond in 1923, Virginia Woolf struggles to write a novel whose protagonist is Mrs Dalloway. In Los Angeles in 1949, Laura ignores her chores and small son to sit in bed reading Mrs Dalloway. In 1990s New York, Clarissa goes to buy flowers for a party, mirroring the start of the fictional Mrs Dalloway’s day. The party is in honour of her sick friend Richard, who long ago dubbed her Mrs Dalloway. As their stories intertwine, they converge to become one, weaving together themes of story-telling, domestic tension, friendship, love, loss, parental guilt, loneliness, bisexuality and the challenges of hosting social rituals. Adapted by Sony Award-winning dramatist Frances Byrnes, this affecting dramatisation stars Fenella Woolgar as Virginia Woolf, Teresa Gallagher as Laura and Rosamund Pike as Clarissa. Directed by Judith Kampfner and Polly Thomas. Produced by Judith Kampfner. A Corporation For Independent Media production for BBC Radio 4.
©2013 BBC Worldwide Ltd (P)2018 BBC Worldwide Ltd
Specimen Days
Summary
In each section of Michael Cunningham's bold new novel, we encounter the same group of characters: a young boy, an older man, and a young woman. "In the Machine" is a ghost story which takes place at the height of the Industrial Revolution, as human beings confront the alienated realities of the new machine age. "The Children's Crusade", set in the early 21st century, plays with the conventions of the noir thriller as it tracks the pursuit of a terrorist band which is detonating bombs seemingly at random around the city. The third part, "Like Beauty", evokes a New York 150 years into the future, when the city is all but overwhelmed by refugees from the first inhabited planet to be contacted by the people of Earth. Presiding over each episode of this interrelated whole is the prophetic figure of the poet Walt Whitman. Specimen Days is a genre-bending, haunting, and transformative ode to life in our greatest city, a work of surpassing power and beauty by one of the most original and daring writers at work today.
©2005 Mare Vaporum Corp. (P)2005 Audio Renaissance
A Home at the End of the World
Summary
Michael Cunningham's celebrated novel is the story of two boyhood friends: Jonathan, lonely, introspective, and unsure of himself; and Bobby, hip, dark, and inarticulate. In New York after college, Bobby moves in with Jonathan and his roommate, Clare, a veteran of the city's erotic wars. Bobby and Clare fall in love, scuttling the plans of Jonathan, who is gay, to father Clare's child. Then, when Clare and Bobby have a baby, the three move to a small house upstate to raise "their" child together and create a new kind of family. A Home at the End of the World masterfully depicts the charged, fragile relationships of urban life today.
©1990 Michael Cunningham (P)2004 Audio Renaissance, a division of Holtzbrinck Publishers, LLC
A Wild Swan
Summary
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. Re-imagined 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."
©2015 Mare Vaporum Corp. (P)2015 Macmillan Audio
The Snow Queen
Summary
Beautiful and heartbreaking, comic and tragic, The Snow Queen once again proves that Michael Cunningham is one of the great novelists of his generation Michael Cunningham’s luminous novel begins with a vision. It’s November 2004. Barrett Meeks, having lost love yet again, is walking through Central Park when he is inspired to look up at the sky; there he sees a pale, translucent light that seems to regard him in a distinctly godlike way. Barrett doesn’t believe in visions - or in God - but he can’t deny what he’s seen. At the same time, in the not-quite-gentrified Bushwick neighbourhood of Brooklyn, Tyler, Barrett’s older brother, a struggling musician, is trying - and failing - to write a song for Beth, his wife-to-be, who is seriously ill. Tyler is determined to write a wedding song that will be not merely a sentimental ballad, but an enduring expression of love. Barrett, haunted by the light, turns unexpectedly to religion. Tyler grows increasingly convinced that only drugs can release his creative powers. Beth tries to face mortality with as much courage as she can summon. Cunningham follows the Meeks brothers as each turns down a different path in his search for transcendence. In subtle, lucid prose, he demonstrates a profound empathy for his conflicted characters and a singular understanding of what lies at the depth of the human soul.
©2014 Michael Cunningham (P)2014 HarperCollins Canada