[2] His fiction includes The Cloud Atlas (Delacorte, 2004), All Saints (Delacorte, 2007), the short story collection Listen (Four Way Books, 2015), and the novel Paris by the Book (Dutton, 2018),[3] as well as short stories in a number of little magazines and literary journals (print and online) including The Awl, Blackbird, Caketrain, Crab Orchard Review, failbetter, Phoebe, Southern Indiana Review, and The Writer's Chronicle.
He has contributed to local public radio stations (WUWM's Lake Effect)[4] and to NPR (both as a writer and as a reader), and has written non-fiction for The Awl, Commonweal, Esquire.com, Forbes, Good Housekeeping, the New York Times Book Review, Parents, Slate, the Washington Post Magazine, and a number of other publications.
He contributed a chapter to the recent compilation My Bookstore:Writers Celebrate Their Favorite Places to Browse, Read and Shop, praising Milwaukee's Boswell Bookshop.
With the worldwide success of the book and the film Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, some confusion has arisen between that work of science fiction and Callanan's unrelated 2004 novel, The Cloud Atlas (set in Alaska during World War II and the 21st century).
He has written on the topic in an essay titled "Ways In Which The Movie Cloud Atlas Has Changed My Life.