Let the Great World Spin: A Novel

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• ISBN13: 9780812973990
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

Product Description
In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets not more than, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in bestselling novelist Colum McCann’s stunningly intricate portrait of a city and its people.

Let the Fantastic World Spin is the critically acclaimed leader’s most ambitious novel yet: a dazzlingly rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s.

Corrigan, a radical young Irish monk, struggles with his own demons as he lives among the prostitutes in the middle of the burning Bronx. A group of mothers gather in a Park Avenue apartment to mourn their sons who died in Vietnam, only to learn just how much divides them even in grief. A young artist finds herself at the scene of a hit-and-run that sends her own life careening sideways. Tillie, a thirty-eight-year-ancient grandmother, turns tricks alongside her teenage daughter, determined not only to take care of her family tree but to prove her own worth.
Elegantly weaving together these and additional seemingly disparate lives, McCann’s powerful allegory comes alive in the unforgettable voices of the city’s people, unexpectedly drawn together by hope, beauty, and the “artistic crime of the century.” A sweeping and radical social novel, Let the Fantastic World Spin captures the spirit of America in a time of transition, extraordinary promise, and, in hindsight, heartbreaking innocence. Hailed as a “fiercely original talent” (San Francisco Chronicle), award-winning novelist McCann has delivered a triumphantly American masterpiece that awakens in us a sense of what the novel can achieve, confront, and even heal.

From the Hardcover edition.Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best of the Month, June 2009: Colum McCann has worked some exquisite magic with Let the Fantastic World Spin, magic a novel of electromagnetic force that defies gravity. It’s August of 1974, a summer “hot and serious and full of death and treachery,” and Watergate and the Vietnam War make the world feel precarious. A stunned hush pauses the cacophonous universe of New York City as a man on a cable walks (repeatedly) between World Trade Center towers. This extraordinary, real-life feat by French funambulist Philippe Petit becomes the touchstone for tales that briefly submerge you in ten varied and intense lives–a street priest, heroin-addicted hookers, mothers mourning sons lost in war, young artists, a Park Avenue judge. All their lives are ordinary and unforgettable, overlapping at the edges, occasionally converging. And when they coalesce in the final pages, the moment hums with such grace that its memory might tense up your throat weeks later. You might find yourself paused, considering the universe of lives one city contains in any slice of time, each of us a singular world, sometimes passing close enough to touch or collide, to birth a new generation or kill it, sending out ripples, leaving residue, an imprint, marking each additional, our city, the very air–compassionately or callously, unable to see all the hurt we do or heal. And most of us stumbling, just trying not to trip, or step in something dreadful.

But then a name does something extraordinary, like dancing on a cable strung 110 tales in the air, or imagining a magnificent novel that lifts us up for a sky-scraping, dizzy glimpse of something greater: the sordid grandeur of this whirling world, “larger than its buildings, larger than its inhabitants.” –Mari Malcolm

Amazon Exclusive: Frank McCourt on Let the Fantastic World Spin

Frank McCourt (1930-2009) was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Irish immigrant parents, grew up in Limerick, Ireland, and returned to America in 1949. For thirty years he taught in New York City high schools. His first book, Angela’s Ashes, won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the L.A. Times Book Award. In 2006, he won the prestigious Ellis Island Family tree Heritage Award for Exemplary Service in the Meadow of the Arts and the United Federation of Teachers John Dewey Award for Excellence in Education. McCourt also wrote Tis and Teacher Man, both life tale. Read his exclusive Amazon guest review of Let the Fantastic World Spin:

Now I worry about Colum McCann. What is he going to do after this blockbuster groundbreaking heartbreaking symphony of a novel? No novelist writing of New York has climbed privileged, dived deeper.

Trust me, this is the sort of book that you will take off your shelf over and over again as the years go along. It’s a tale of the early 1970s, but it’s also the tale of our present times. And it is, in many ways, a tale of a moment of lasting redemption even in the face of all the evidence.

There are dozens of intimate tales and threads at the core of Let the Fantastic World Spin. On one level there’s the tightrope walker building his way across the World Trade Center towers. But as the novel goes along the “walker” becomes less and less of a focal point and we start to care more about the people down not more than, on the pavement, in the ordinary throes of their being. There’s an Irish monk living in the Bronx projects. There’s a Park Avenue mother in mourning for her dead son, who was blown up in the cafés of Saigon. There are the original computer hackers who “visit” New York in an early echo of the Internet. There’s an artist who has learn to return to the simplicity of like. And then–in possibly the book’s wildest and most ambitious section–there’s a Bronx hooker who has brought up her children in “the house that horse built”–“horse” of course being the heroin that was ubiquitous in the ’70s.

All the voices feel realized and authentic and the writing floats along. This was my city back then–and now. McCann has written about New York before, but never reasonably as piercingly or as provocatively as this. This is fiction that gets the heart thumping.

The tales are interweaved so that it is one tale, on one day, in one city, and yet it is also a history of the present time. In Let the Fantastic World Spin, you can’t snub the overtones for today: suffice it to say that the novel is held together by an act of redemption and beauty. I didn’t want to stop turning the pages.

I’m really not sure what McCann will do after this, but this is a fantastic New York book, not just for New Yorkers but for anyone who walks any sort of tightrope at all. And yes, it doesn’t surprise me that it takes an Irishman to capture the heart of the city… –Frank McCourt

(Photo © Kit DeFever)

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