As 2015 drew to a close, the New York Public Library embarked on a library wide book discussion. Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin was selected, and all library employees were provided a copy to read. Book discussions were held periodically and to wrap things up McCann himself came to the library to talk about the book, his writing and his influences. Afterwards I caught up with him for a short follow-up interview.

During the beginning of the Q&A you said that James Joyce’s Ulysses was very important  to you. You also said that Gary Snyder and other Beat Poets made you want to come to America in the first place. Are there any others that were influential in your life and career?

My father was the features editor at the Evening Press, part of the Irish Press Group in Dublin.  Effectively that meant he was literary editor.  He came home with all sorts of fascinating books, especially from the Beats.  Kerouac and Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg and yes Snyder too.  I remember stumbling across Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America when I was about 13 or 14 years old.  I never knew books could be constructed like that.  Next came The Tokyo Montana Express.  So I was into all the Beats at a time when my own imagination was just becoming elastic and so of course I identified.  Actually I didn't get into Irish literature until later.  I read Benedict Kiely's short story "A Ball of Malt and Madame Butterfly" when I was 16. It stunned me.  Ben was a friend of my father's.  He became a mentor of sorts.  I didn't really find Ulysses until I was in my mid-20s.  But I feel the books are constantly opening up to me.

What are you currently reading or what is next on your list? ​

I'm reading Pond by a young Irish writer Claire-Louise Bennett. It's a marvelous little book, a series of stories knitted together into a haunting work of fiction. It's like reading Gaddis or even Brautigan, but tonally so different. It's luxuriant and ordinary at the same time. The sentences clang and sing.

Is there a book you return to and read again and again?

I go back to Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje. I can always find something mesmeric there.   

You said you have three children, was there a favorite book you read to them? ​

I read them an Irish book called The Second Best Children in the World by Mary Lavin.  It's a book that I adored in my own childhood.

More about Colum McCann's recommendations

Let the Great World Spin brings together the disparate stories of a handful of very different characters whose lives intersect to varying degrees. All share a common experience: their lives are touched, however briefly, by the famed tightrope walk between the World Trade Towers by Philippe Petit, popularized in such films as Man on Wire (2008) and The Walk (2015). McCann expertly weaves these fictional narratives around historical fact until fantasy and reality are not mere components, but support, enhance and entwine one another.

Much has been said of James Joyce’s Ulysses: it has been hailed as a modernist masterpiece, denounced as obscene and emetic, and held up as the last word in experimental realism. The book follows two men and some of their fellow Dubliners during the course of one single, ordinary day. It not only includes their wanderings and conversations, but all that floods their minds throughout. The human mind is a vast and complex thing: it has been said that there are more connections in the human brain than stars in the universe. While the facts do not back this up, recording everything that goes through a person’s mind, all the ideas, memories, emotions and reactions to their surroundings is a Herculean task and the result would be nearly unreadable. Ulysses manages to chronicle much of these two men’s inner workings as well as the outside forces that shape them while remaining an engaging and interesting read.

Richard Brautigan wrote Trout Fishing in America before his other books, but it wasn’t published until 1969, eight years after it was written. Anecdotal stories that critique and poke fun at mainstream America, the book is an absurdist, abstract piece of fiction in which the phrase Trout Fishing in America is used variously as a character's name, a descriptor of another character, a location, an action and several other things as well. The book was Brautigan’s best known, and was said to be the quintessential '60s counterculture youth-movement book.

Benedict Kiely was born in Northern Ireland and many of his works, be they short stories, children’s fiction, novels or essays, tend to focus on rural Ireland. It is thought that these are often somewhat autobiographical and that the characters may be from Kiely’s real life. A Ball of Malt and Madame Butterfly tells the tale of a man’s unrequited love for a Dublin prostitute. The more he shows his love for her the more it interferes with her job and thus the more his love for her is rebuked.

Pond is a collection of short stories and was a well received debut for Claire-Louise Bennett. The stories form a sort of fragmented novel about a woman - probably the same woman though this is not concretely stated—living alone in a rural area of Ireland. Obsessively detailed descriptions of the surroundings and a wonderful stream of consciousness style combine to create a book that many say is more an experience, a feeling, a place itself than a thing of ink and paper.

Winner of the 1976 Books in Canada First Novel Award, Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter uses both fact and fiction to depict the last few months of sanity experienced by New Orleans jazz legend Buddy Bolden. Photographer E. J. Bellocq is a secondary character in this tale of all-consuming passion, obsession, addiction and art. One reviewer called it “a daring, audacious little book that defies categorization—experimenting with fiction and non-fiction, photography, and dramatic changes of tense and voice” which would seem to fit with Bolden’s famously improvisational style.

Mary Lavin was a pioneering feminist author in Ireland. She wrote 19 collections of short stories, three novels and won three Guggenheim Fellowships along with a number of literary awards. The Second Best Children in the World is about three children—Ben, Kate and Matt—who decide to give their parents a vacation from being parents, so they take themselves on a trip around the world.

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