Category Archives: News

The A.V. Club’s Best Books of 2015: West of Sunset

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West of Sunset was named as one of the best books of 2015 by the A.V. Club!

Here’s the full text:

Lists of best books tend to lean toward the ones that set out to be masterpieces, works of staggering ambition or untold history or great stylistic risk. That’s understandable, but there’s something to be said for the simple pleasure of a good story told well, and by that score, Stewart O’Nan’s West Of Sunset is one of the most purely enjoyable novels of the year. The book is a candid but forgiving look at F. Scott Fitzgerald’s lost years in Hollywood, where one of America’s best writers found himself sinking in a quicksand of booze and glamour, his triumphs far behind him. Those who ache for the Art Deco era will find it irresistible, but even Gatsby virgins will find it as captivating as a bottle of champagne, with O’Nan providing the fizz and Fitzgerald the hangover. [Ryan Vlastelica]

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Washington Post’s Notable Fiction Books of 2015

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West of Sunset was chosen as one of the Notable Fiction Books of 2015 by the Washington Post!  Here’s what they said about it:

O’Nan compassionately and beautifully evokes the grim last act of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life, when he worked as a Hollywood screenwriter. Sick with alcoholism and tuberculosis, he labored to make flimsy scripts better, a tired but relentless craftsman. — Maureen Corrigan

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West of Sunset in the News

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The Guardian

West of Sunset by Stewart O’Nan review – a fine fictional F Scott Fitzgerald

Sadness, estrangement and promise mark the last three years of the Great Gatsby author’s life as a helpless Hollywood hack

O’Nan imagines the last three years of Fitzgerald’s life, from 1937 to 1940, less as a second act than an intermission; a moment of uncertainty, in which the familiar scenery disappeared. West of Sunset captures the sadness of such moments, but also their promise: as its second epigraph states, “nothing was impossible – everything was just beginning.”

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Yorkshire Post

The gossip columnist who made Hollywood

“Few people who grew up against that kind of backdrop in the early 20th century ever escaped poverty, but Sheilah was a pretty incredible woman,” says American author Stewart O’Nan, whose latest novel West of Sunset is a fictionalised account of the last three years of the life of F Scott Fitzgerald when he lived with Graham.

“Her first job as a teenager was in a department store, but she had her sights set on much bigger things and became a music hall dancer. It gave her a taste of the entertainment business and before she left for America she had also begun writing a column for the Daily Express.”

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Liza Klaussmann & Stewart O’Nan: Visions of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edinburgh Book Festival

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On August 22, Stewart was at the Edinburgh Book Festival!  Here was the topic that was discussed:

VISIONS OF F SCOTT FITZGERALD

Two different periods of F Scott Fitzgerald’s life are covered in novels from Liza Klaussmann and Stewart O’Nan. In Villa America, Klaussmann has Fitzgerald and Zelda alongside Picasso and Cole Porter as summer guests of two wealthy ex-pats. In O’Nan’s West Of Sunset Zelda is in an asylum leaving Fitzgerald, a struggling artist, trying to reclaim his past glories in Hollywood. Chaired by Stephen McGinty.

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Here’s a review of the event:

This entertaining discussion about F. Scott Fitzgerald was like eavesdropping on an animated, cultural conversation during a literary soiree at Gertude Stein’s Parisian apartment.

Stephen McGinty was the charming host with his guests, Liza Klaussmann and Stewart O’Nan who have both published fictional accounts of the glamorous Gatsby-esque life and tragic early death of the American novelist.

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