Colum McCann Books In Order

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. Songdogs (1995)
  2. This Side of Brightness (1998)
  3. Zoli (2001)
  4. Dancer (2003)
  5. Let the Great World Spin (2009)
  6. TransAtlantic (2013)
  7. Apeirogon (2020)

Short Story Collections In Publication Order

  1. Fishing the Sloe-Black River (1984)
  2. Everything in This Country Must (2000)
  3. Thirteen Ways of Looking (2015)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. 365 Days in Ireland Calendar 2010 (2009)
  2. Letters to a Young Writer (2017)

Anthologies In Publication Order

  1. From the Republic of Conscience (2010)

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Short Story Collections Book Covers

Non-Fiction Book Covers

Anthologies Book Covers

Colum McCann Books Overview

Songdogs

With unreliable memories and scraps of photographs as his only clues, Conor Lyons follows in the tracks of his father, a rootless photographer, as he moved from war torn Spain, to the barren plains of Mexico, where he met and married Conor’s mother, to the American West, and finally back to Ireland, where the marriage and the story reach their heartrending climax. As the narratives of Conor’s quest and his parents’ lives twine and untwine, Collum McCann creates a mesmerizing evocation of the gulf between memory and imagination, love and loss, past and present.

This Side of Brightness

From the author of Songdogs, a magnificent work of imagination and history set in the tunnels of New York City. In the early years of the century, Nathan Walker leaves his native Georgia for New York City and the most dangerous job in America. A sandhog, he burrows beneath the East River, digging the tunnel that will carry trains from Brooklyn to Manhattan. Above ground, the sandhogs black, white, Irish, Italian keep their distance from each other until a spectacular accident welds a bond between Walker and his fellow diggers a bond that will bless and curse the next three generations. Years later, Treefrog, a homeless man driven below by a shameful secret, endures a punishing winter in his subway nest. In tones ranging from bleak to disturbingly funny, Treefrog recounts his strategies of survival killing rats, scavenging for discarded soda cans, washing in the snow. Between Nathan Walker and Treefrog stretch seventy years of ill fated loves and unintended crimes. In a triumph of plotting, the two stories fuse to form a tale of family, race, and redemption that is as bold and fabulous as New York City itself. In This Side of Brightness, Colum McCann confirms his place in the front ranks of modern writers.

Zoli

A unique love story, a tale of loss, a parable of Europe, this haunting novel is an examination of intimacy and betrayal in a community rarely captured so vibrantly in contemporary literature.

Zoli Novotna, a young woman raised in the traveling Gypsy tradition, is a poet by accident as much as desire. As 1930s fascism spreads over Czechoslovakia, Zoli and her grandfather flee to join a clan of fellow Romani harpists. Sharpened by the world of books, which is often frowned upon in the Romani tradition, Zoli becomes the poster girl for a brave new world. As she shapes the ancient songs to her times, she finds her gift embraced by the Gypsy people and savored by a young English expatriate, Stephen Swann.

But Zoli soon finds that when she falls she cannot fall halfway neither in love nor in politics. While Zoli’s fame and poetic skills deepen, the ruling Communists begin to use her for their own favor. Cast out from her family, Zoli abandons her past to journey to the West, in a novel that spans the 20th century and travels the breadth of Europe.

Colum McCann, acclaimed author of Dancer and This Side of Brightness, has created a sensuous novel about exile, belonging and survival, based loosely on the true story of the Romani poet Papsuza. It spans the twentieth century and travels the breadth of Europe. In the tradition of Steinbeck, Coetzee, and Ondaatje, McCann finds the art inherent in social and political history, while vividly depicting how far one gifted woman must journey to find where she belongs.

Dancer

From the acclaimed author of This Side of Brightness, the epic life and times of Rudolf Nureyev, reimagined in a dazzlingly inventive masterpiece published to coincide with the tenth anniversary of Nureyev’s deathA Russian peasant who became an international legend, a Cold War exile who inspired millions, an artist whose name stood for genius, sex, and excess the magnificence of Rudolf Nureyev’s life and work are known, but now Colum McCann, in his most daring novel yet, reinvents this erotically charged figure through the light he cast on those who knew him. Taking his inspiration from the biographical facts, McCann tells the story through a chorus of voices: there is Anna Vasileva, Rudi’s first ballet teacher, who rescues her prot g from the stunted life of his town; Yulia, whose sexual and artistic ambitions are thwarted by her Soviet sanctioned marriage; and Victor, the Venezuelan hustler, who reveals the lurid underside of the gay celebrity set. Spanning four decades and many worlds, from the horrors of Stalingrad to the wild abandon of New York in the eighties, Dancer is peopled by a large cast of characters, obscure and famous: doormen and shoemakers, Margot Fonteyn and John Lennon. And at the heart of the spectacle stands the artist himself, willful, lustful, and driven by a never to be met need for perfection. In ecstatic prose, McCann evokes the distinct consciousness of the man and the glittering reflection of the myth. The result is a monumental story of love, art, and exile.

Let the Great World Spin

In the dawning light of a late summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in bestselling novelist Colum McCann’s stunningly intricate portrait of a city and its people. Let the Great World Spin is the critically acclaimed author s most ambitious novel yet: a dazzlingly rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s. Corrigan, a radical young Irish monk, struggles with his own demons as he lives among the prostitutes in the middle of the burning Bronx. A group of mothers gather in a Park Avenue apartment to mourn their sons who died in Vietnam, only to discover just how much divides them even in grief. A young artist finds herself at the scene of a hit and run that sends her own life careening sideways. Tillie, a thirty eight year old grandmother, turns tricks alongside her teenage daughter, determined not only to take care of her family but to prove her own worth. Elegantly weaving together these and other seemingly disparate lives, McCann s powerful allegory comes alive in the unforgettable voices of the city s people, unexpectedly drawn together by hope, beauty, and the artistic crime of the century. A sweeping and radical social novel, Let the Great World Spin captures the spirit of America in a time of transition, extraordinary promise, and, in hindsight, heartbreaking innocence. Hailed as a fiercely original talent San Francisco Chronicle, award winning novelist McCann has delivered a triumphantly American masterpiece that awakens in us a sense of what the novel can achieve, confront, and even heal. From the Hardcover edition.

Fishing the Sloe-Black River

The short fiction of Colum McCann documents a dizzying cast of characters in exile, loss, love, and displacement. There is the worn boxing champion who steals clothes from a New Orleans laundromat, the rumored survivor of Hiroshima who emigrates to the tranquil coast of Western Ireland, the Irishwoman who journeys through America in search of silence and solitude. But what is found in these stories, and discovered by these characters, is the astonishing poetry and peace found in the mundane: a memory, a scent on the wind, the grace in the curve of a street. Fishing the Sloe Black River is a work of pure augury, of the channeling and re spoken lives of people exposed to the beauty of the everyday.

Everything in This Country Must

One powerful novella, with two thematically linked short stories on either side of it, forms the basis of Everything in This Country Must. Although these are stories about Ireland and the Troubles, they have an almost mythical rather than a political feel. In the title story, four young soldiers help a farmer and his daughter free their horse from a stream in flood, unable to understand that their help will never be anything but an insult. In the novella, ‘Hunger Strike’, a young boy and his mother flee to Galway as the boy’s uncle succumbs to a hunger strike in a Derry gaol. In ‘Wood’, a ten year old boy is asked by his mother to make poles for the marching season.

365 Days in Ireland Calendar 2010

A place where magic thrives in the land, in hearts, in history and heritage Ireland stays with its visitors for a lifetime. 365 Days in Ireland is a magnificent tribute to the Emerald Isle, with hundreds of full color photographs and lyrical text by novelist Colum McCann. Fishing boats in Dingle Harbor. The pastoral beauty of sheep dotted meadows and whitewashed cottages. The rugged, rocky west coast of Inishmore. Medieval castles falling into ruin and ancient dolmens, mysterious relics of prehistory. Plus black faced sheep, the cascading river Inagh, Ha’penny Bridge, and cozy pubs that serve up yeasty, dark pints and hearty Irish stew. This is Ireland, beautiful, spirited, and unforgettable.

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