Dear Festival Friends,

For help articulating our love of Michael Cunningham’s storytelling, we turn to a wise philosopher, Ferris Bueller: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

Cunningham is the master of the stop and look around. In exquisitely crafted novels including The Hours, By Nightfall, and Day, he slows the clock to take us through the intimate moments that make up a life. He does not so much pause to smell the roses—no clichés with him—as he lingers on the deceptively mundane and makes it priceless. By working in the quiet spaces, dwelling on the fleeting details that catch his characters’ thoughts, he puts us in their often ill-fitting skin. “The novel remains the most effective means of telling a reader what it’s like to be somebody else,” he once told The Guardian. “You can burrow into these little bastards’ minds and hearts.” Fiction sparks empathy, and Cunningham is particularly adept at getting us to look up from our own navels to appreciate even his most challenging bastards.

The young author was living in an unheated loft and tending bar in New York when he promised himself he’d finish his first novel before he turned thirty. He did it, and in Golden States, about a boy coming of age in Reagan-era Southern California, we see glimmers of the Cunningham characters and themes we know and love. His next two novels, A Home at the End of the World and Flesh and Blood, settle us comfortably in Cunningham territory with their meticulous observation of small moments that have huge significance. Then came his breakout hit, The Hours. Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway (a lifelong favorite of Cunningham’s), the book is an imaginative triptych that crosses decades and continents to follow a New York book editor, a postwar California housewife, and Woolf herself through the course of a single day. The Hours won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and was adapted into an Oscar-winning film almost as beloved as the book. (Santa Fe locals: Mark your calendars for April 30, when we will be hosting a special screening of The Hours as part of our community partnership with Violet Crown Cinema.)

Cunningham followed The Hours with three acclaimed novels and a nonfiction homage to Provincetown, Massachusetts, then made us wait nine long years before publishing his latest book, Day. (Time is an important element in Cunningham’s work, as many of his book titles imply.) Like The Hours, it has a trifold structure; it takes place during three consecutive years of the pandemic, on the same date. Without once mentioning Covid, Cunningham artfully tracks the subtle yet devastating effects of uncertainty and forced togetherness on one New York family. He snoops around in his characters’ heads, exposing their fretful worries and obsessions with a jeweler’s precision. Yet he does it in a way that’s so poignantly relatable, we can’t help but love these people. As ever, the language is incomparable; you can read Cunningham’s work for the beauty of his sentences alone. In its review of Day, The Washington Post said, “The only problem with Michael Cunningham’s prose is that it ruins you for mere mortals’ work. He is the most elegant writer in America.” We agree, and are therefore beating a sloppy retreat from this newsletter.

If you want to see Cunningham in all his flawless glory, get your Festival tickets now. Tickets for him and other bestselling authors, including Viet Thanh Nguyen, Marie Arana, Michael Pollan, Terry Tempest Williams, and Cristina Rivera Garza, are going fast and could be gone in days if not hours.

IN OTHER NEWS

We are pleased to announce that Bookworks will be our on-site bookseller during the 2025 Festival. Head on over to their dedicated SFILF page and preorder all your books here.

Richard Eeds hosted us last week on Santa Fe’s own KTRC 1260 | 103.7 Talk Radio, chatting about the Festival, our love of books, and fun things to do while you’re here in May. Have a listen here.

Board of Directors
Edward Gale, Chair

Janet Bailey | Mark Bryant | Clare Hertel

Jenny Kimball | James McGrath Morris

Carmella Padilla | Jenna Scanlan

Mary Sloane | Maria Gale, Ex Officio

Founders
Clare Hertel | Carmella Padilla | Mark Bryant