Media/Photos
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Video Trailer for Apeirogon
This is the first in a series of short videos where Colum McCann talks about his new novel, Apeirogon. “A work of incredible magnitude . . . McCann finds the emotional accuracy, the sensitivity, and the beauty to tell the heartbreaking reality of life in Israel-Palestine, while allowing readers a glimmer of necessary hope. Apeirogon is greater…
Let The Great World Spin: All respects to heaven, I Like It Here
More great work directed by Giovanni Villari inspired by “Let the Great World Spin”
Let The Great World Spin: This is the House that Horse Built
More video work from Giovanni Villari, inspired by “Let the Great World Spin”
Let The Great World Spin: Those Who Saw Him Hushed
Check out the great work directed by Giovanni Villari on YouTube – which was inspired by “Let the Great World Spin”
Colum McCann and Pól Ó Braonáin
Aoibhinn meets writer Colum Mc Cann and musician Pól Ó Braonáin who have collaborated on a song called Transatlantic, based on Colum’s novel of the same name and featured on Clannad’s new album Nadur. Listen >
“Stories can be muscular”
Colum McCann, author and president of Narrative 4, describes how telling his story gave him strength after a man assaulted him in New Haven, Connecticut, in 2014. Video by Larisa Epatko
Dessert
THE sky would always be this shade of blue. The towers had come down the day before. Third Avenue on the Upper East Side was a flutter of missing faces, the posters taped to the mailboxes, plastered on windows, flapping against the light poles: “Looking for Derek Sword”; “Have You Seen This Person?”; “Matt…
Overdue: the Country of Literature
A couple of years ago a 57-year-old in Hancock Michigan was searching through the attic of his family home, when he opened a box and a dusty copy of a book called “Prince of Egypt” fell out. He flicked to the back cover and discovered that it was a library book forty-seven years overdue. Over the years, the book had been misplaced and boxed and re-boxed and misplaced again.
But Always Meeting Ourselves
A LONDON nursing home. The shape of a figure beneath the sheets. My grandfather could just about whisper. He wanted a cigarette and a glass of whiskey. “Come up on the bed here, young fella,” he said, gruffly. It was 1975 and I was 10 years old and it would be the first — and probably last — time I’d ever see him. Gangrene was taking him away. He reached for the bottle and managed to light a cigarette. Spittle collected at the edge of his mouth. He began talking, but most of the details of his life had already begun slipping away.
The Word Made Flesh
BOXING. You can press the language out of it. The sweathouse of the body. The moving machinery of ligaments. The intimate fray of rope. The men in their archaic stances like anatomy illustrations from an old-time encyclopedia. The moment in a fight when the punches slow down and the opponents watch each other like time-lapse photographs—the sweat frozen in midair, the blood still spinning, the maniacal grin like the teeth themselves have gone bare-knuckle.
What Baseball Does to the Soul
IT was long before baseball ever enchanted me, and long before I ever knew anything of the Yankees, and long before I learned that a pitch could swerve, yet it came back to me, years later, sitting in the bleachers at Yankee Stadium, a curveball from the past.
The Music of What Happens
Imagine this: It is August, 1950. He is Irish. He is in London. He is engaged to be married in Westminster Church to a pretty farm-girl from Northern Ireland. He tells her in love letters that her beauty paints the world well. Shortly before the wedding she gets cold feet. She cancels the service. In his grief and confusion he joins the British Air Force and gets sent to Egypt as an intelligence officer.
