Usually calling a collection of short stories “tales” or anything other than “stories” is a bad sign for me. It means the author is “doing” something, and too often, that’s not a good thing. Michael Cunningham wrote The Hours. It won a bunch of prizes. He also wrote a few other books that I have generally liked. Specimen Days is a weird kind of triptych novel set against New York with connections to Walt Whitman and terrorism and cyborgs. And I really liked it. I did not […]