Author Archives: SJW

The Odds: The Buffalo News Book Club, June 2014 Selection

Posted on by

AR-140609770

Novel of couple’s critical Falls trip is Book Club June selection

A couple return to Niagara Falls in a desperate effort to save their marriage

You probably know a couple just like Art and Marion Fowler, the long-married, middle-aged pair whose complicated and unexpectedly tender story Stewart O’Nan tells in his novel “The Odds.”

You might even be just like Art and Marion Fowler.

As we meet them, they are financially battered and emotionally scarred, facing the loss of their house in Cleveland and the inevitable end of their lives together.

And yet they have the ability to take one more gamble, a desperate bet that just might save them.

Where better to throw their future on the line than a casino in Niagara Falls, Ont.?

[more]

 

Washington Post: Who’ll Miss a Red Lobster?

Posted on by

Image

From The Washington Post’s Style Blog:

Some investors reacted negatively to Friday’s announcement that Darden will sell the Red Lobster restaurant chain to a private equity firm for $2.1 billion.

Wall Street bankers and lawyers can argue over the wisdom of dumping the seafood restaurants for quick cash — but leave it to a novelist to consider the real cost for workers as they’re forced to deal with the upheaval of new corporate management.

[more]

This Week’s Must Read: Malaysia Flight 370 and the World’s Attention

Posted on by

npr_books_logo

NPR has highlighted Stewart’s novel Songs for the Missing in regard to the missing Malaysia Flight 370:

What happens when the systems, institutions, technology and networks we’ve put into place for our protection, fail us? Consigned to speculation, how do we deal with the unresolved? What if the scant information we are able to cobble together, only deepens the mystery, and compounds our unknowing? What lengths will we go to for the answers we must have?

These are just a few of the many questions that have arisen in the wake of the unexplained disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

Stewart O’Nan’s brilliant 2008 novel, Songs for the Missing, though it features no ill-fated airliners, raises many of the same questions.

[more]

University of North Carolina 2014 Distinguished Writer-in-Residence

Posted on by

unc

Stewart will be visiting the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as the 2014 Distinguished Writer-in-Residence.  Here’s his upcoming schedule.

2014 Distinguished Writer-in-Residence Reading
Thursday, February 27, 7:30 p.m.
Genome Sciences Building Auditorium

Film Screening of Snow Angels
Monday, February 24, 5:00pm
Varsity Theater on Franklin St
Discussion with Stewart O’Nan following screening

“Baseball: The Great American Story” Panel
Wednesday, February 26, 3:30pm
Hyde Hall
Panelists: Coach Mike Fox, Tar Heels baseball
Gabby Calvocoressi, poet and catcher emeritus
Stewart O’Nan, Faithful
Sam Stephenson, Bull City Summer

[more]

Stewart O’Nan: Pittsburgh’s Novelist of the Everyday

Posted on by

Belt

From an interview in Belt Magazine:

When time enough has passed for critics to start assessing how the Great Recession played out in American literature, it’s likely they’ll take a close look at Stewart O’Nan’s recent novels, especially 2007’s Last Night at the Lobster and 2011’s Emily, Alone. That’s partly because, dispiritingly enough, the shelf of novels that address the lower rungs of the middle class is a small one. But even in a crowded field, O’Nan’s books would stand out. In Lobster, O’Nan delivers both a close study of Manny, the manager of a soon-to-close Connecticut Red Lobster franchise, and of the workers and patrons who share their lives inside it during one day, captive to a brutal snowstorm. It’s early, but the novella is one of the most potent and sharpest portraits of work in the new century—few books in any era have done such a fine job of exploring how corporations stoke our loyalty, and how easily they betray it.

[more]