Fishing the Sloe-Black River
Stories
ISBN10: 0312423381
ISBN13: 9780312423384
Trade Paperback
208 Pages
$20.00
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 respoken lives of people exposed to the beauty of the everyday.
Reviews
Praise for Fishing the Sloe-Black River
"A gifted and determined stylist, Colum McCann seems to have taken a vow never to write a dull line."—The New York Times Book Review
"Rich, powerful stories that place McCann at the front ranks of contemporary Irish writers."—San Francisco Chronicle
"Beautiful . . . These well-made stories, written with fierce beauty, are sure of their effect and power."—The Washington Post Book World
"There is magic in this McCann, and he brings to each page a special sorcery with the voices he conjures . . . No one can read through and not emerge feeling changed, somehow ennobled by it."—The Baltimore Sun
"Tender and tough, artfully controlled and freewheeling . . . McCann has made himself a writer of consequence."—Newsday