You really don't need me to tell you about Michael Cunningham's novel, THE HOURS, winner of last year's Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It is so beautifully written that I almost ached at points while reading it.

First, let me tell you why I am a year late in commenting on this book, just released in paperback by Picador. Michael Cunningham is an author who I interviewed nearly a decade ago when his first novel, " A Home at the End of the Year," was published. But in the passing ten year span, the publishing world has gone the way of most of the art industry. Publishing houses have been swallowed up, are no longer independent, and are subsidiaries of conglomerates. Publishers, these days, are less interested in readers than they are in markets. An author is not to be nurtured. He or she either breaks big or gets remaindered. It is what has happened to theatre and film. The Off-Off-Broadway play and the independent movie is a reaction to Disney musicals and blockbuster films. My efforts last year to receive a press copy of Mr. Cunningham's book went unanswered. WBAI is a small market. When it seems as if an author is breaking big, it's time for Oprah, The Today Show and the New York Times. Authors have little say in the win - or sink - strategies of the bean counters.

When this reality became clear to me a few years ago, I pouted for a moment, then realized I should not personalize it. It is part of the way the world is swirling and I have chosen, clearly, to be at WBAI - very much off the fast track. With that, is the joy of discovering the undiscovered author, the ignored independent movie, the overlooked theatrical offering.

By chance, Michael Cunningham's agent's husband listens to this program and suggested that she contact me, and I at last received a copy of Mr. Cunningham's majestic novel.

THE HOURS is about three women, linked by the slim thread of Virginia Woolf's novel, "Mrs. Dalloway." And his is a novel about time. We are all so self-absorbed, centers of our own universe, and Michael Cunningham reminds us, in his tale, that we are just a moment in eternity, but that it is our moment.

The women - Virginia Woolf, Laura Brown and Clarissa Vaughan - are obsessed with Ms. Woolf's novel, "Mrs. Dalloway." For various reasons, that celebrated fictional roman a clef has invaded the lives of Mr. Cunningham's ladies.

Tennessee Williams writes at the end of "Sweet Bird of Youth": "I don't ask for your pity, but just for your understanding - not even that - no. Just for your recognition of me in you, and the enemy, time, in us all."

Michael Cunningham doesn't necessarily regard time as the enemy - he is much more neutral. Time is. It is that simple. THE HOURS is so well crafted that you begin to suspect that if a single word was altered the entire story might collapse. But, of course, it doesn't. It merely builds and pulls you in. Clarrisa Vaughan is from the present, reflecting on her lifetime of relationships and a male friend dying of AIDS. Laura Brown, a generation earlier, is trying to grasp her mundane surroundings and the slavish love from her only son. And Virginia Woolf, in the 1920's, is attempting to find a bridge between her creative intensity and her personal life. Michael Cunningham has curiously bound these women together. They are women searching.

In this book, which is not more than a novella, he has made these women so alive. For me, his great accomplishment is that he prompted me to explore , in my mind, the women I have known who are similar to these three anti-heroines, to try to more clearly understand their ways and my relationship to them.

Can you ask any more of a novel than to have it enthrall you, enrich you, prompt you to explore your own memories and relationships? Michael Cunningham has achieved all of this with THE HOURS, and the prizes he has won for it are all well earned.

I suggest that you make time to read Michael Cunningham's THE HOURS.