Michael Cunningham on originality in fiction, and realizing his destiny while bartending at a tiki bar

Send us Fan MailMichael Cunningham is the author of seven novels, as well as a short story collection and several non-fiction books, including his travelogue, Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown. He had intended to become an artist, but when a girlfriend induced him to read Virginia Woolf a seed was planted that would eventually blossoming into his 1998 Pulitzer-winning novel, The Hours, in which three narratives of women's lives alternate and intersect to luminous effect. Of his own craft he has said, “in the writing of a novel one must find a balance between calculation and intuition. Too much calculation, and it’s just a Swiss music box, it just doesn’t feel alive; and too much intuition and it’s just a mess.” Getting that percentage of calculation to intuition right are the authors of the two books that Cunningham has selected to talk about today, including George Saunder’s Booker Prize winning novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.