Novelist Stewart O’Nan, whose latest is “Songs For the Missing,” will read Wednesday at 7 p.m. at the Konover Auditorium in the Dodd Research Center, 405 Babbidge Road, University of Connecticut, Storrs. Information: creativewriting.uconn.edu or 860-486-2324.
There are many other authors at the event who will enchant children and adults. Missouri Poet Laureate Walter Bargen will read, the Cake Doctor will talk about cooking, novelist Stewart O’Nan will talk about fiction. Even these three don’t do justice to the range of authors at the event. For the full schedule at http://www.bigread.net/schedule.htm.
Great Ficton Panel
3-4pm
with Curtis Sittenfeld
Before he became her writing student at Cornell University, author Stewart O’Nan met Lorrie Moore on the printed page in the early 1980s.
Mr. O’Nan, who lives in Edgewood, was startled by Ms. Moore’s first short story collection, “Self Help.”
“Those stories were written in the second person, which is very rare,” he said, adding that her work also made him think about what a story is and what it does.
Mr. O’Nan will introduce his former teacher when she appears tonight at 7:30 in Carnegie Music Hall as part of the Drue Heinz Lectures. He discussed her work because she had strep throat last week and couldn’t do a telephone interview.
Songs For The Missing is one of the more uncomfortable novels I’ve read all year. It’s almost too real. Too close to something we know and hold close to our hearts. Almost invariably we know someone too similar to Kim Larsen. As the weeks pile up and the cadaver dogs are called in we cannot help but feel the helplessness of the Larsen family. What if it were us that this was happening to?
A biography of a prominent Hartford clergyman and a novel about the devastating effects on a family when their daughter suddenly disappears are among the winners of the 2009 Connecticut Book Awards.
Stewart O’Nan won the fiction award for his novel “Songs for the Missing.”
The Works of Stewart O'Nan 