Fishing the Sloe-Black River

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.

Colum McCann is the author of three highly praised novels, This Side of Brightness (Owl Books, 0-8050-5453-7), Songdogs (Picador, 0-312-14741-4), and Everything in This Country Must (Picador, 0-312-27318-5). He has received a Pushcart prize and the Irish Rooney Award. He lives in New York City.