5/2: Stewart O’Nan & Jane McCafferty @ CLP – Main

Posted on May 1, 2012 by SJW

Wednesday, May 2, 2012 at 6:00 PM
Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh – Main (Oakland)
4400 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Good friends and novelists Stewart O’Nan and Jane McCafferty appear together for Writers LIVE with their latest novels.

Stewart O’Nan, a Pittsburgher and self-proclaimed Pirates fan, is a nationally acclaimed author who has built a following all over the country for novels like Emily Alone and Last Night at the Lobster. Kirkus Reviews calls his latest novella The Odds “a valentine to marriage as it is actually lived in troubled times.” The Odds follows the Fowlers to Niagara Falls on their second honeymoon where they bet their remaining life savings in hopes of saving everything else – even their crumbling marriage. Stewart O’Nan is author of 14 novels, a screenplay, and two works of nonfiction. He says he got his first big break as a writer when he won the 1993 Drue Heinz Literature Prize for his collection of short stories, In the Walled City.

Jane McCafferty is author of the new novel First You Try Everything, and a Professor of Creative Writing at Carnegie Mellon University. Set in present-day Pittsburgh, her latest novel is about the unraveling of the marriage of Ben and Evvie Muldoone and the agonizing process of divorce. The Oprah Magazine blog, O, says that First You Try Everything is “a life-stopping novel by Jane McCafferty, a crackerjack of a writer…”. Jane McCafferty won the 1992 Drue Heinz Literature Prize for her collection of short fiction, Director of the World.

A book signing follows the program, with copies of First You Try Everything and The Odds available from the Penguin Bookshop.

For more information, contact Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures at 412-622-8866, email info@pittsburghlectures.org, or visit www.pittsburghlectures.org.

Related story at the Post-Gazette:

Authors Stewart O’Nan and Jane McCafferty tackle love and marriage

In the category of calculated risks, marriage is undoubtedly the ultimate gamble.

Art and Marion Fowler, a Cleveland couple verging on bankruptcy, roll their wedded dice one last time by returning to Niagara Falls, where they honeymooned 30 years ago. Their story unfolds in Stewart O’Nan’s 14th novel, “The Odds.”

Mr. O’Nan, who lives in Edgewood, will read from “The Odds” on Wednesday at the main Carnegie Library branch in Oakland. Joining him for the reading and a conversation will be his colleague, Carnegie Mellon University English professor Jane McCafferty. She will read from her novel “First You Try Everything,” which was published this year by HarperCollins. [See review of both books from the Jan. 29 Post-Gazette.]

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Stewart at Duquesne

Posted on April 4, 2012 by SJW

From The Duquensne Duke:

Author Stewart O’Nan talks to students, profs about writing at Duquesne’s Power Center Ballroom

Acclaimed American author Stewart O’Nan spoke and read some of his work at Duquesne on Monday in the Power Center Ballroom, as part of the English department’s First Year Writing Program Event.

O’Nan, a Pittsburgh native, whose award-winning novels have earned national recognition, drew a crowd of 750 students and professors. His most well-known novel, 2008 national bestseller Last Night at the Lobster, was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

During his speech, O’Nan stressed that it is important for every writer to constantly read.

“I love to read. I think all writing comes from reading and a love of reading,” O’Nan said.

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Stewart O’Nan: Our best working novelist?

Posted on March 1, 2012 by SJW

From Salon.com, where Jonathan Evison asks:

Stewart O’Nan: Our best working novelist?
Unlike anyone else, O’Nan delivers a new book every year that speaks directly to the anxieties of our fearful times

“Not much of a defensive catcher, but a great bad-ball hitter,” my companion says over the rim of his beer glass.

We’re on our third pint — at least. My companion’s literary escort, a fastidious professional in both dress and manner, checks her watch for the fourth time, smiling politely but somewhat nervously when I catch her at it. Her charge has got an 7 a.m. wakeup call, and she’s tasked with getting him to the airport on time and in one piece. It’s her job — and I’m doing my best to disrupt it.

We find ourselves at a really dumb bar in Seattle’s financial district, where I’m sitting across from the closest thing I’ve got to a living American literary idol. At 51, he still strikes a boyish cast with his high rosy cheeks, his mischievous eyes, and his well-worn Pittsburgh Pirates cap. But here’s a guy who over the past two decades has given us 13 dazzlingly dynamic novels. In an age of literary snobbery, MFA elitism and postmodern irony, all of which have helped marginalize the novel, here’s a guy who writes spectacularly without an ounce of pretension. A guy who writes about the people nobody else is writing about. An editor I know put it this way: “At a time when we are talking about class and income inequality, he’s the novelist who has best captured the shifting state of America, what it is like to live outside of cities, to wrestle with what has happened to the working and middle classes outside of shiny urban places.”

I’m sitting across from Stewart O’Nan, and I’m thinking to myself: Is this guy our best working novelist?

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2/27 8pm: Literary New England Radio Show

Posted on February 27, 2012 by SJW

Stewart will be on Literary New England Book Club tonight! The show begins at 8pm. From the site:

Our February Literary New England Book Club meeting with American Dervish author Ayad Akhtar! Also: Ben Winters on The Mystery of Missing Everything; Roberta Gately on Lipstick in Afghanistan; Stewart O’Nan on The Odds; and so much more!

Listeners will have the chance to win The Mystery of Missing Everything, Lipstick in Afghanistan and The Odds.