Colum McCann

"Bassam Aramin is Palestinian. Rami Elhanan is Israeli. They inhabit a world of intractable conflict that colors every aspect of their daily lives, from the roads they are allowed to take to the schools their daughters, Abir and Smadar, each attend. Theirs is a life in which children from both sides of the wall throw stones at one another. But their worlds shift irreparably when ten-year-old old Abir is killed by a rubber bullet meant to quell unruly...

"One of the best books I've read in many, many years, if not in my life."—Anderson Cooper

Featured on MSNBC's Morning Joe

What does a mother say to the person responsible for kidnapping, torturing, and murdering her son? National Book Award-winning author Colum McCann channels Diane Foley's voice as she tells her story, as the mother of American journalist Jim Foley –

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A story collection includes the title novella, in which an octogenarian retired judge's musings on his life are interrupted by police updates about his murder later that afternoon.

When an Irish immigrant is killed, building the 1910s New York subway, a black co-worker supports his family, marrying the widow. The story is contrasted with today's subway, a place not of hope, but despair.

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...

"A passionate story of love, loss, and renewal set against the political upheavals of twentieth century Europe, Zoli captures the world of Gypsies more vibrantly than any other novel of the modern era. Zoli Novotna, a young woman raised in the traveling Gypsy tradition, is a poet by accident as much as desire. As fascism spreads over 1930s Czechoslovakia, Zoli and her grandfather flee to join a clan of fellow Romani harpists. But as Zoli's fame grows...

Occupying a space between traditional nature writing, memoir, journalism, and prose poetry, Bruce Berger's essays are beautiful, subtle, and haunting meditations on the landscape and culture of the American Southwest. Combining new, unpublished essays with selections from his acclaimed trilogy of "desert books"--The Telling Distance, There Was a River, and Almost an Island--A Desert Harvest is a career-spanning selection of the best work by this unique...

"The powerful story of the rebuilding of the World Trade Center, featuring dozens of never-before-seen color photos by the official site photographer"-- In late 2014, One World Trade Center-- or the Freedom Tower-- opened for business. It had taken nearly ten years, cost roughly four billion dollars, and had suffered setbacks that would have most likely scuttled any other project. Today it serves as a reminder of what America is capable of when we...

Eighty pieces of short fiction and nonfiction on manhood by some of the world's best writers. To help launch the literary nonprofit Narrative 4, Esquire asked eighty of the world's greatest writers to chip in with a story, all with the title, "How to Be a Man." The result is The Book of Men, an unflinching investigation into the essence of manhood.