Let the Great World Spin »

Colum McCann, the author of the acclaimed Songdogs and Fishing the Sloe-Black River (Owl Books, 0-8050-4107-9), was recently described as "New York's most visible up-and-coming Irish writer" (The New York Times). He lives in New York City with his wife and daughter.

A Pushcart Prize-winning author and contributor to the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, and GQ, Colum McCann is renowned for his carefully constructed character studies. No exception, Let the Great World Spin follows the fortunes of a menagerie of New Yorkers through a day in 1974 the day of Philippe Petit's deathdefying tightrope walk between the newly built Twin Towers.

"... written with verve, empathy and stylistic mastery." Kirkus Reviews

The Barnes & Noble Review

Raised in Dublin and relocated to New York City, the Irish novelist Colum McCann has been confined in his fiction to no one place, time, or culture. His novel Zoli chronicled a fictional woman poet of the Romani people, while Dancer wove its wide research into the intimately imagined story of Rudolf Nureyev, the driven ballet genius born into Soviet poverty. In an earlier novel, This Side of Brightness, McCann explored the tunnels that run beneath Manhattan, using them as a landscape, a window onto history, and a symbol of life that carries on out of sight, in spite of society's best effort to neglect it.