Jeffrey Brown:
The Irish-born New York-based McCann, whom we met recently in Santa Fe, New Mexico at the Zane Bennett Contemporary Art Gallery, is known for vivid writing and storytelling that burrows into big, real-world subjects.
Among his novels, “Let the Great World Spin,” a fictionalized account of Philippe Petit, the French acrobat who tightrope to cross the Twin Towers in 1974. It won the National Book Award for fiction in 2009, capturing a sense of loss after 9/11.
2013’s “TransAtlantic,” a series of linked stories and lives bound by a world-changing flight. And “Apeirogon” from 2020, which explored the suffering, loss, and pain of the Middle East in a fragmentary novel based on two real lives, one Israeli, one Palestinian.
