Colum McCann

Isaiah Sheffer sits down with two great contemporary authors, Colum McCann and Colm Toibin, to discuss their books, Let the Great World Spin and Brooklyn. Michael Cerveris reads excerpts from the two novels.

A story collection includes the title novella, in which an octogenarian retired judge's musings on his life are interrupted by police updates about his murder later that afternoon.

When an Irish immigrant is killed, building the 1910s New York subway, a black co-worker supports his family, marrying the widow. The story is contrasted with today's subway, a place not of hope, but despair.

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...

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...

A 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 in this novel McCann reinvents this erotically charged figure, willful, lustful, and driven by a never-to-be-met need for perfection, through the light he cast on those who knew him. Spanning four decades and many worlds, from the horrors...

"In late 2021, Diane Foley sat at a table across from her son's killer, Alexanda Kotey, a member of the ISIS group known as "The Beatles" who plead guilty to the kidnapping, torture, and murder of her son seven years before. Kotey was about to go serve life imprisonment and this was Diane's chance to talk to the man who had been involved with brutally taking her son's last breath. What would she say to his killer? What would he reveal to her? Might...

Deeply personal, subtly subversive, at times harrowing and indeed funny, yet also full of comfort, this collection is a rumination on the power of storytelling in a world where language and memory can falter yet do not fail us, and a contemplation of the healing power of literature.