Audiobooks by Colum McCann

Letters to a Young Writer: Some Practical and Philosophical Advice

From the bestselling author of the National Book Award winner Let the Great World Spin comes a lesson in how to be a writer—and so much more than that. Intriguing and inspirational, this book is a call to look outward rather than inward. McCann asks his readers to constantly push the boundaries of experience, to see empathy and wonder in the stories we craft and hear. A paean to the power of language, both by argument and by example, Letters to a Young Writer is fierce and honest in its testament to the bruises delivered by writing as both a profession and a calling. It charges aspiring writers to learn the rules and even break them. These fifty-two essays are ultimately a profound challenge to a new generation to bring truth and light to a dark world through their art. Praise for the fiction of Colum McCann Let the Great World Spin Winner of the National Book Award “One of the most electric, profound novels I have read in years.”—Jonathan Mahler, The New York Times Book Review “There’s so much passion and humor and pure life force on every page that you’ll find yourself giddy, dizzy, overwhelmed.”—Dave Eggers TransAtlantic Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award “Reminiscent of the finest work of Michael Ondaatje and Michael Cunningham.”—O: The Oprah Magazine “Another sweeping, beautifully constructed tapestry of life . . . Reading McCann is a rare joy.”—The Seattle Times Thirteen Ways of Looking A New York Times Notable Book of the Year “The irreducible mystery of human experience ties this small collection together, and in each of these stories McCann explores that theme in strikingly effective ways.”—The Washington Post “Extraordinary . . . incandescent.”—Chicago Tribune

Colum McCann (Author), Colum McCann (Narrator)

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Thirteen Ways of Looking

Told from a multitude of perspectives, in lyrical, hypnotic prose, Thirteen Ways of Looking is a ground-breaking work of true resonance. Accompanied by three equally powerful stories set in Afghanistan, Galway and London, this is a tribute to humanity's search for meaning and grace, from a writer at the height of his form, capable of imagining immensities even in the smallest corners of our lives.

Colum McCann (Author), Colum McCann (Narrator)

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Thirteen Ways of Looking

NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY CHICAGO TRIBUNE AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review - NPR - Los Angeles Times -The Boston Globe -The Seattle Times - The Independent In such acclaimed novels as Let the Great World Spin and TransAtlantic, National Book Award-winning author Colum McCann has transfixed readers with his precision, tenderness, and authority. Now, in his first collection of short fiction in more than a decade, McCann charts the territory of chance, and the profound and intimate consequences of even our smallest moments. "As it was, it was like being set down in the best of poems, carried into a cold landscape, blindfolded, turned around, unblindfolded, forced, then, to invent new ways of seeing." In the exuberant title novella, a retired judge reflects on his life's work, unaware as he goes about his daily routines that this particular morning will be his last. In "Sh'khol," a mother spending Christmas alone with her son confronts the unthinkable when he disappears while swimming off the coast near their home in Ireland. In "Treaty," an elderly nun catches a snippet of a news report in which it is revealed that the man who once kidnapped and brutalized her is alive, masquerading as an agent of peace. And in "What Time Is It Now, Where You Are?" a writer constructs a story about a Marine in Afghanistan calling home on New Year's Eve. Deeply personal, subtly subversive, at times harrowing, and indeed funny, yet also full of comfort, Thirteen Ways of Looking is a striking achievement. With unsurpassed empathy for his characters and their inner lives, Colum McCann forges from their stories a profound tribute to our search for meaning and grace. The collection is a rumination on the power of storytelling in a world where language and memory can sometimes falter, but in the end do not fail us, and a contemplation of the healing power of literature. Praise for Thirteen Ways of Looking "The irreducible mystery of human experience ties this small collection together, and in each of these stories McCann explores that theme in some strikingly effective ways. . . . [The first story] is as fascinating as it is poignant. . . . [The second] captures the mundane and mysterious aspects of shaping characters from the gray clay of words, placing them in realistic settings and breathing life into their lungs. . . . That he makes the story so emotionally compelling is a sign of his genius. . . . The most remarkable [piece] is Sh'khol. . . . Caught in the rushing currents of this drama, you know you're reading a little masterpiece."-The Washington Post "McCann is a writer of power and subtlety and beauty. . . . The powerful title story loiters in the mind long after you've read it."-Sarah Lyall, The New York Times "[McCann] unspools complex and unforgettable stories in this, his first collection in more than a decade."-The Boston Globe "McCann is a passionate writer whose impulse is always toward a generous understanding of his diverse characters."-The Wall Street Journal "Powerful, profound, and deeply empathetic, McCann's beautifully wrought writing in Thirteen Ways of Looking glides off the page."-BuzzFeed "McCann weaves the magic that made Let the Great World Spin so acclaimed."-The Huffington Post From the Hardcover edition.

Colum McCann (Author), Colum McCann (Narrator)

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Let the Great World Spin

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER Colum McCann's beloved novel inspired by Philippe Petit's daring high-wire stunt, which is also depicted in the filmThe Walkstarring Joseph Gordon-LevittIn 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.Praise for Let the Great World SpinThis is a gorgeous book, multilayered and deeply felt, and it's a damned lot of fun to read, too. Leave it to an Irishman to write one of the greatest-ever novels about New York. There's so much passion and humor and pure lifeforce on every page of Let the Great World Spin that you'll find yourself giddy, dizzy, overwhelmed. Dave EggersStunning . . . [an] elegiac glimpse of hope . . . It's a novel rooted firmly in time and place. It vividly captures New York at its worst and best. But it transcends all that. In the end, it's a novel about families the ones we're born into and the ones we make for ourselves. USA Today The first great 9/11 novel . . . We are all dancing on the wire of history, and even on solid ground we breathe the thinnest of air. Esquire Mesmerizing . . . a Joycean look at the lives of New Yorkers changed by a single act on a single day . . . Colum McCann's marvelously rich novel . . . weaves a portrait of a city and a moment, dizzyingly satisfying to read and difficult to put down. TheSeattle Times Vibrantly whole . . . With a series of spare, gorgeously wrought vignettes, Colum McCann brings 1970s New York to life. . . . And as always, McCann's heart-stoppingly simple descriptions wow. Entertainment Weekly An act of pure bravado, dizzying proof that to keep your balance you need to know how to fall. O: The Oprah MagazineFrom the Hardcover edition.

Colum McCann (Author), Various Narrators (Narrator)

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Transatlantik (Ungekürzte Fassung)

1845: Der ehemalige Sklave Frederick Douglass reist durch das von Hungersnot gepeinigte Irland, um für die Abschaffung der Sklaverei zu werben. 1919: Zwei Flieger unternehmen den ersten Nonstop-Flug über den Atlantik mit Kurs auf Irland. 1998: Ein US-Senator verlässt seine junge Familie, um die Friedensgespräche in Belfast zu einem unsicheren Abschluss zu führen. Hinter diesen drei großen Momente irischer Geschichte kommen die Schicksale dreier unbekannter Frauen zum Vorschein: Angefangen mit der irischen Hausmagd Lily, in der Frederick Douglass die Liebe zur Freiheit weckt, folgt das Hörbuch ihren Nachfahrinnen in die USA und wieder zurück. Bis ein über Generationen vergessener Brief wieder auftaucht ...

Colum McCann (Author), Gabriele Blum, Wolfram Koch (Narrator)

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TransAtlantic: A Novel

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE - NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY KIRKUS REVIEWS In the National Book Award - winning Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann thrilled readers with a marvelous high-wire act of fiction that The New York Times Book Review called "an emotional tour de force." Now McCann demonstrates once again why he is one of the most acclaimed and essential authors of his generation with a soaring novel that spans continents, leaps centuries, and unites a cast of deftly rendered characters, both real and imagined. Newfoundland, 1919. Two aviators - Jack Alcock and Arthur Brown - set course for Ireland as they attempt the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean, placing their trust in a modified bomber to heal the wounds of the Great War. Dublin, 1845 and 46. On an international lecture tour in support of his subversive autobiography, Frederick Douglass finds the Irish people sympathetic to the abolitionist cause - despite the fact that, as famine ravages the countryside, the poor suffer from hardships that are astonishing even to an American slave. New York, 1998. Leaving behind a young wife and newborn child, Senator George Mitchell departs for Belfast, where it has fallen to him, the son of an Irish-American father and a Lebanese mother, to shepherd Northern Irelands notoriously bitter and volatile peace talks to an uncertain conclusion. These three iconic crossings are connected by a series of remarkable women whose personal stories are caught up in the swells of history. Beginning with Irish housemaid Lily Duggan, who crosses paths with Frederick Douglass, the novel follows her daughter and granddaughter, Emily and Lottie, and culminates in the present-day story of Hannah Carson, in whom all the hopes and failures of previous generations live on. From the loughs of Ireland to the flatlands of Missouri and the windswept coast of Newfoundland, their journeys mirror the progress and shape of history. They each learn that even the most unassuming moments of grace have a way of rippling through time, space, and memory. The most mature work yet from an incomparable storyteller, TransAtlantic is a profound meditation on identity and history in a wide world that grows somehow smaller and more wondrous with each passing year. Praise for TransAtlantic "A dazzlingly talented authors latest high-wire act . . . Reminiscent of the finest work of Michael Ondaatje and Michael Cunningham, TransAtlantic is Colum McCanns most penetrating novel yet." - O: The Oprah Magazine "One of the greatest pleasures of TransAtlantic is how provisional it makes history feel, how intimate, and intensely real. . . . Here is the uncanny thing McCann finds again and again about the miraculous: that it is inseparable from the everyday." - The Boston Globe "Ingenious . . . The intricate connections [McCann] has crafted between the stories of his women and our men [seem] written in air, in water, and - given that his subject is the confluence of Irish and American history - in blood." - Esquire "Another sweeping, beautifully constructed tapestry of life . . . Reading McCann is a rare joy." - The Seattle Times "Entrancing . . . McCann folds his epic meticulously into this relatively slim volume like an accordion; each pleat holds music - elation and sorrow." - The Denver PostFrom the Hardcover edition.

Colum McCann (Author), Geraldine Hughes (Narrator)

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Let the Great World Spin

New York, August 1974. A man is walking in the sky and the city stands still, captivated by this sight, awe and disbelief filling the streets. Philipe Petit is making his famous tightrope walk across the World Trade Centre. Set against a time of sweeping political and social change a single audacious event will intricately bind these apparent strangers, transforming their lives.

Colum McCann (Author), Alma Cuervo, Carol Monda, Cherise Boothe, Chris Sorensen, Colum McCann, Colum Mccann, Denica Fairman, Gerard Doyle, Jim Frangione, Johanna Parker, Lizan Mitchell, Multiple Narrators, Patricia Floyd, Ramon De Ocampo, Richard Poe (Narrator)

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