Patrik Henry Bass of Essence Magazine reports on newly released book titles and the world of publishing in The Book Reader.

While writing “The Last Tycoon,” his fifth and final novel, author F. Scott Fitzgerald famously scribbled the line: “There are no second acts in American lives.” Stewart O’Nan, one of the best living American novelists, mines the final years of the famed Great Gatsby storyteller’s life and turns up literary gold.

“West of Sunset” offers a far different Fitzgerald than the glittering and dazzling chronicler of the Jazz Age many of us envisioned when reading classics such as “Tender Is the Night” and “This Side of Paradise.” In fact, “West of Sunset” could’ve easily been titled The Other Side of Paradise.

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