Twelve stories about Irish misfits by the author of Songdogs include the tale of the anorexic nun who dies in a Long Island hospital and the talkative beautician who works with corpses.

The first critical approach to the literary career of the 2009 National Book Award winner Understanding Colum McCann chronicles the Irish-born writer's journey to literary celebrity from his days as a teenage sportswriter for the Irish Press in the 1970s, through the publication of his award-winning first story, "Tresses," in 1990, to his winning the 2009 National Book Award in fiction for the international bestseller Let the Great World Spin. In this first critical study of McCann's body of work, John Cusatis provides an introduction to McCann's life and career; an overview of his major themes, style, and influences; and close readings of his two short story collections and five novels. Cusatis traces McCann's redefinition of the Irish novel, exploring the author's propensity for transcending aesthetic, cultural, ethnic, geographical, and social boundaries in his ascent from the status of "Irish novelist" to "international novelist." In the process, this study illuminates the various incarnations of McCann's perennial subject: exile, both geographical and emotional. Cusatis also delineates how the influences of McCann's Irish upbringing, penchant for international travel, and exhaustive and eclectic reading of literature manifest themselves in his fiction. Close attention is given to McCann's stylistic trademarks, such as his poetic voice, use of Christian symbolism, Irish and classical mythology, intertextuality, multiple viewpoints, nonlinear plot structure, and the merger of what McCann deems "factual truth" and "textual truth." Understanding Colum McCann makes use of the existing body of published interviews, profiles, and critical articles, as well as a decade of correspondence between Cusatis and McCann. With international interest in McCann on the rise, this first full-length study of his career to date serves as an ideal point of entrance for students, scholars, and serious readers, and offers the biographical and critical foundation necessary for a deeper understanding of McCann's fiction.

Conversations with Colum McCann brings together eighteen interviews with a world-renowned fiction writer. Ranging from his 1994 literary debut, Fishing the Sloe-Black River, to a previously unpublished interview conducted in 2016, these interviews represent the development as well as the continuation of McCann's interests. The number and length of the later conversations attest to his star-power. Let the Great World Spin earned him the National Book Award and promises to become a major motion picture. His most recent novel, TransAtlantic, has awed readers with its dynamic yoking of the 1845-46 visit of Frederick Douglass to Ireland, the 1919 first nonstop transatlantic flight of Alcock and Brown, and Senator George Mitchell's 1998 efforts to achieve a peace accord in Northern Ireland. An extensive interview by scholar Cécile Maudet is included here, as is an interview by John Cusatis, who wrote Understanding Colum McCann, the first extensive critical analysis of McCann's work. An author who actually enjoys talking about his work, McCann (b. 1965) offers insights into his method of writing, what he hopes to achieve, as well as the challenge of writing each novel to go beyond his accomplishments in the novel before. Readers will note how many of his responses include stories in which he himself is the object of the humor and how often his remarks reveal insights into his character as a man who sees the grittiness of the urban landscape but never loses faith in the strength of ordinary people and their capacity to prevail.

Colum McCann is one of the most important Irish writers in contemporary literary fiction. His work has been critically acclaimed across the globe for its artistic achievement, its thematic range and its ethical force. This Side of Brightness: Essays on the Fiction of Colum McCann is the first collection of scholarly essays to deal with McCann's oeuvre, drawing on the pioneering critical work of some of the leading figures in Irish literary studies. Touching on a host of central themes in McCann's writing - emigration, race, performance, poverty, travel, nationality and globalization - the volume covers each of McCann's publications and includes a substantial interview with the author. The book is an invaluable resource for current and future scholars of the Irish novel.

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.

This award-winning multi-volume series is dedicated to making literature and its creators better understood and more accessible to students and interested readers, while satisfying the standards of librarians, teachers and scholars. Dictionary of Literary Biography provides reliable information in an easily comprehensible format, while placing writers in the larger perspective of literary history. Dictionary of Literary Biography systematically presents career biographies and criticism of writers from all eras and all genres through volumes dedicated to specific types of literature and time periods. For a listing of Dictionary of Literary Biography volumes sorted by genre click here. 01