Perhaps I'm the last person to discover Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin, the achingly beautiful 2009 National Book Award winner, though I certainly hope not. Though he grew up in Ireland, McCann somehow pulled off an authentic native's story of New York City in 1974, when hookers and heroin and breakdancers and arson defined the Bronx, and the Vietnam War and disillusionment hung like a cloud over everything.

That summer, President Nixon resigned. That summer, a young French acrobat named Philippe Petit brazenly stretched and then walked a tightrope between the as-yet-unopened World Trade Center towers. And in the midst of all this, ordinary people tried to get on with their lives, as they always do: falling in love, grieving, wrestling with God, falling out of love, maintaining dignity in the face of dishonor, and all the rest.

Yes, this is a novel of interlocking stories, all of which have something to do with the tightrope walker, even in the smallest of ways. We meet the judge who arraigns Petit after he is captured, for example, musing about what might have happened if the stunt had gone wrong. "It was America, after all. The sort of place where you should be allowed to walk as high as you wanted. But what if you were the one walking underneath?"

Most of the characters are walking underneath -- literally, as with the prostitutes who ply their trade under the Major Deegan Expressway, as well as metaphorically, as with the modernist painter who has run out of brilliant ideas, if he ever had them in the first place. Meanwhile, the novelist himself is bouncing on a high wire between sentimentality and melancholy. Like Petit, McCann teases us, pulling back just before he falls over the edge, and then springing up to reveal another human truth with awful clarity and beautiful language.

What makes Let The Great World Spin so effective, as a friend recently observed, is the authenticity of each character. Colum McCann portrays a wide variety of characters and each of them feels completely true. No character is shortchanged by any kind of stereotype, without exception. As any library bookshelf will tell you, this is far easier said than done.

McCann started with an event -- the tightrope walk -- and imagined an entire world to go with it. The thing is, he got it right. As Jonathan Mahler's recent history, Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx Is Burning, also reminds us, New York City really was like that. In so many ways, it still is, here and everywhere. We all still try to find our sense of humor and a reason to believe. Great literature reminds us of this, and why it's all worthwhile.

Growing up, I would often hear my mom recount the story of where she was when she heard that JFK was shot (she was walking around her high-school campus). I never understood why that moment was so etched in her memory until I saw the TV report of the Twin Towers falling on September 11th (I was settling in to my senior year of college). Events of these magnitude leave such an indelible mark on our psyche, and as cliché as the question might sound, we can’t help but ask, "Where were you when…?" In his remarkable novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer explores one brave child’s experience of this tragedy and his resulting incredible journey.

It's a brave thing to write about something so life-shaking and raw as 9/11 and I'd only read one novel before that broached the subject (Jay McInerney’s extraordinarily moving The Good Life). But when a friend suggested I pick up Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (despite the movie previews, which, truth be told, didn't seem too appealing to me), I began reading it.

If you’ve seen the previews then you know that the novel is about a young boy dealing with his father's death in the World Trade Center. But what you don't get is that beyond Safran Foer’s hauntingly beautiful descriptions and clever word gimmicks, the story is a simple one: It's about the love we have for someone who has gone missing and the journey we take to get back to them.

Safran Foer’s protagonist is Oskar Schell, a precocious nine-year-old, who is, among many things (or so his business card states), an Inventor, Jewelry Designer, amateur Entomologist, Francophile, and Vegan. But of all these things, Oskar is a loving, if not slightly peculiar, son. And when he discovers a key hidden within a blue vase in his father’s closet, so begins a two-year journey that will take him through all five New York City boroughs and to the doorsteps of some of the most fascinating characters you’re likely to ever come across. Often alone and mostly on foot (a result of his post-9/11 fear of public transportation), Oskar sets out in search of finding both the lock and some answers to how exactly his father died on that day.

At times bizarre, laugh-out-loud funny, and heartbreaking, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close manages to avoid being overly sentimental or sappy while still doing right by a really tough subject. It is so uniquely crafted and filled with such tender, honest moments between a father and a son that I’m envious of those of you out there who have yet to pick it up and begin reading.