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Colum McCann

Författare till Let the Great World Spin

30+ verk 12,385 medlemmar 694 recensioner 40 favoritmärkta

Om författaren

Irish writer Colum McCann was born near Dublin in 1965 and graduated from the University of Texas with a B.A. degree. He has worked as a newspaper journalist in Ireland and written several short stories and bestselling novels. The short film of Everything in this Country Must was nominated for an visa mer Academy Award in 2005. McCann's work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, The Irish Times, La Repubblica, Die Zeit, Paris Match, the Guardian, and the Independent. He has won numerous awards, such as a Pushcart Prize, the Rooney Prize, the Irish Novel of the Year Award, and the 2002 Ireland Fund of Monaco Princess Grace Memorial Literary Award. In 2009 McCann was inducted into the Irish arts association Aosdana. He teaches in the Master of Fine Arts Creative Writing program at New York's Hunter College. (Bowker Author Biography) visa färre

Verk av Colum McCann

Let the Great World Spin (2009) 5,934 exemplar
TransAtlantic (2013) 1,808 exemplar
Apeirogon (2020) 925 exemplar
Dansare : roman (2003) 870 exemplar
This Side of Brightness (1997) 681 exemplar
Zoli (2006) 620 exemplar
Thirteen Ways of Looking (2015) 564 exemplar
Songdogs (1995) 274 exemplar
Everything in This Country Must: A Novella and Two Stories (2000) — Författare — 246 exemplar
Fishing the Sloe-Black River (1996) 225 exemplar
American Mother (2024) 7 exemplar
Gone (Kindle Single) (2014) 5 exemplar

Associerade verk

Dublinbor (1914) — Förord, vissa utgåvor19,570 exemplar
The Best American Short Stories 2015 (2015) — Bidragsgivare — 223 exemplar
The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction (1999) — Bidragsgivare — 149 exemplar
Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation (2017) — Bidragsgivare — 118 exemplar
Granta 109: Work (2009) — Bidragsgivare — 116 exemplar
Best European Fiction 2011 (2010) — Förord, vissa utgåvor107 exemplar
Eat Joy: Stories & Comfort Food from 31 Celebrated Writers (2019) — Bidragsgivare — 66 exemplar
My Discovery of America (1926) — Förord, vissa utgåvor60 exemplar
The Anchor Book of New Irish Writing (2000) — Bidragsgivare — 39 exemplar
Coming of Age Around the World: A Multicultural Anthology (2007) — Bidragsgivare — 24 exemplar
The Best New Irish Short Stories of 2005 (2005) — Bidragsgivare — 10 exemplar

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I had started this book of 12 stories about six or so years ago and then misplaced it. I found it again while spring cleaning. It was a nice surprise and I set out to re-read the stories I read earlier and finish the ones I had not. Once again, I am mesmerized by McCann's tight, gorgeous command of language. This relatively short book (196 pages) is focused on modern Irish people who have either emigrated or still cling to home. That seemed to be the common thread.
In the title story, "Fishing the Sloe-Black River," women go to a riverbank to fish for sons to replace the ones who have moved away from Ireland. One of my favorites, "A Basket Full of Wallpaper," was evocative of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, not just in name. In it, a Japanese survivor of Hiroshima moves to a small Irish village and compulsively wallpapers his cottage over and over, creating an ever-thickening insulation against the maddening world. Gilman's protagonist is lost in the wallpaper in the room to which she is confined as she descends into madness. Another favorite was "Cathal's Lake," a tale in which a new swan appears in the farmer's pond each time someone is killed in Irish factional violence until his pond is completely filled with swans.… (mer)
 
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bschweiger | 8 andra recensioner | Feb 4, 2024 |
An “apeirogon” is “a shape with a countably infinite number of sides.” And Apeirogon, the novel, is a story with a countably infinite number of tellings, depending on the teller, and the day, and the synergies. The story takes place in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and brings together two men – 67-year-old Jewish graphic designer Rami Elhanan and Palestinian Bassam Aramin, who survived seven years in an Israeli jail. Coping with grief over the senseless killing of their daughters draws them together. Rami’s teenage daughter, Smadar, was killed in a suicide bombing in 1997. Bassam’s ten-year-old daughter, Abir, was felled by a rubber bullet shot by Israeli soldiers in a truck passing by as she and her friends came from the store where she bought a candy bracelet. The two men work through the grief that unites them in the Parents Circle-Family Forum, made up of parents and other relatives on both sides of the ever-present conflict who lost their loved ones. But my summary could never do justice to the exquisite prose, the sensitivity and skill McCann has in making tangible the agonies of these men living always with both the unbearable loss of their daughters and the omnipresent reality of the occupation, which he beautifully described as “the rim of a tightening lung.”

A bit about the structure of the novel. There are, in essence, 1,001 chapterlets that do not unfold in a linear fashion but are logical. Some are one sentence long; others go on for pages. They tell the central story; they go off on wonderfully informative tangents. The middle of the book is where we get the full story of each of the protagonists – in chapter 1001, which is both preceded and succeeded by chapter 500. The chapterlets in the first half of the book are numbered 1 to 500, and in the second half of the book are numbered backwards from 500 to 1. I assume the 1,001 was a nod to 1,001 Arabian Nights, which he mentions a couple of times in the book.
… (mer)
 
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bschweiger | 53 andra recensioner | Feb 4, 2024 |
Once in a while you come across a book that crackles with some electricity that hums deep inside you, and you know you are under the pull of a great work. Let the Great World Spin is such a novel for me. Using the real Iife event of Philippe Petit’s 1974 tightrope walk between the twin towers of the World Trade Center as the jumping off point to weave a tale, Mr. McCann gives us rich, varied characters whose lives peripherally or intimately collide on that day. The writing itself is so lovely, the tales sad and funny and poignant. The tightrope walker’s tale. The tale of the judge before whom he was brought after being taken into custody. The tale of the two prostitutes charged with robbery, on the court’s docket just before the tightrope walker. The Irish monk who watched out for the hookers in his neighborhood, whose brother comes from Ireland to stay with him — their beginnings in Dublin, their interconnection with others in the novel. I cared about the characters, their small stories and how they intersected with each other on that day. It was like a modern day Canterbury Tales. Lovely, lovely book.… (mer)
 
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bschweiger | 313 andra recensioner | Feb 4, 2024 |
I first read this book several years ago, a half a year or so after I was privileged to attend a Writer's Conference at which Mr. McCann was one of the keynote speakers and a lecturer in two of the workshops I took that weekend. I enjoyed it then but did not appreciate it as much as I do now, with some distance, because many of the pieces of advice were tidbits I had only recently jotted down in my notebook from the conference and they did not seem so remarkable.

With a little distance, I can now more clearly see the beauty in Mr. McCann's writing and the value in his advice. How could you not be in love with writing that begins a chapter: "Be a camera. 'Language' us into vision. Make us feel as if we are there. Colors, sounds, sights. Bring us to the pulse of the moment."? As a long-time writer (although my writing has usually been the service of one job or another, which for the past 24 years has been as a lawyer and before that, a newspaper reporter), I have often read writing magazines, books, and articles to help me improve my writing, and some advice was just plain terrible, but much of it was helpful. Mr. McCann reminds us to "go into" ourselves, borrowing a phrase from poet Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, but also to look outward for inspiration. He also reminded readers that even though we should listen to and value advice from successful writers, we still must be true to ourselves, there is no single path to success, and if we don't actually sit down and write what is our own, we will never succeed.

This is a book that I must pick up again and again, to enjoy the language and to spark my creativity. There is still an unwritten novel or two in me and reading this book anew has lit that fire in me again. I am now going to keep it near my computer whenever I feel stuck or in just in need of reading some beautiful language.
… (mer)
 
Flaggad
bschweiger | 9 andra recensioner | Feb 4, 2024 |

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Statistik

Verk
30
Även av
15
Medlemmar
12,385
Popularitet
#1,893
Betyg
3.9
Recensioner
694
ISBN
386
Språk
21
Favoritmärkt
40

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