Category Archives: News

Emily, Alone: A Novel

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From the author of Last Night at the Lobster, a moving vision of love and family.

A sequel to the bestselling, much-beloved Wish You Were Here, Stewart O’Nan’s intimate new novel follows Emily Maxwell, a widow whose grown children have long moved away. She dreams of vists by her grandchildren while mourning the turnover of her quiet Pittsburgh neighborhood, but when her sole companion and sister-in-law Arlene faints at their favorite breakfast buffet, Emily’s days change. As she grapples with her new independence, she discovers a hidden strength and realizes that life always offers new possibilities. Like most older women, Emily is a familiar yet invisible figure, one rarely portrayed so honestly. Her mingled feelings-of pride and regret, joy and sorrow- are gracefully rendered in wholly unexpected ways. Once again making the ordinary and overlooked not merely visible but vital to understanding our own lives, Emily, Alone confirms O’Nan as an American master.

pub date: March 17, 2011

Buy the Book at Barnes & Noble buyfromamazon IndieBound

Brooklyn Bookfest

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Sunday, September 12, 2010

10am: How Things Shake Out. Stewart O’Nan (Songs For the Missing), Siri Hustvedt (The Shaking Woman) and T Cooper, The Beaufort Diaries read from their new books and discuss the intersection of reality and fiction. ST. FRANCIS MARONEY SCREENING ROOM

2pm: What Fresh Hell is This? Imagine you’re stuck someplace. You can’t get out. The behavior of everyone around you continually increases your discomfort. Now what do you do? Readings by Sigrid Nunez, Stewart O’Nan, and Benjamin Percy, followed by Q&A. ST. FRANCIS READING ROOM

[directions to the festival]

Writer Stewart O’Nan took roundabout route to successful writing career

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From the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

Writer Stewart O’Nan is sitting at D’s SixPax and Dogz in Regent Square, talking about his life, his work and returning to Pittsburgh last year after a 30-year absence.

He talks about his family — his father, an engineer; his mother, a schoolteacher — and how they set examples for him, and of his wife, Trudy, a Butler native and social worker, who convinced him to quit his career as an aerospace engineer to study writing. He speaks of the proverbial Pittsburgh work ethic and how that has stood him well in all of his endeavors.

Then the conversation turns to former jobs.

“I was a dishwasher,” he says. “Every time I do a dish, a record falls. … I never got to be waitstaff, I never got to be a busboy. I was always a dishwasher, and that’s where you get to hear the best stories.”

Small wonder then that O’Nan, 49, is one of the best storytellers in contemporary fiction. His novels and stories often spotlight characters who are ignored by the mainstream, though they often are in plain sight.

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B&N Finalists for 2009 Discover Great New Writers Awards

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Barnes & Noble Announces the Finalists for the 2009 Discover Great New Writers Awards:

Fiction
Barb Johnson, More of This World or Maybe Another (HarperPerennial)
Victor Lodato, Mathilda Savitch (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
C. E. Morgan, All the Living (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Nonfiction
Dave Cullen, Columbine (Twelve)
Toby Lester, The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends of the Earth, and the Epic Story of the Map that Gave America Its Name (Free Press)
Neil White, In the Sanctuary of Outcasts: A Memoir (William Morrow)

The Jurists
Two panels of distinguished literary jurists (each of whom was selected for the Discover program earlier in their careers) selected the finalists and will select the winners. Serving as this year’s fiction jurists are Kathryn Harrison, the author of numerous books, including the novels Thicker Than Water, Envy, and The Seal Wife, and the memoirs The Kiss and The Mother Knot; Stewart O’Nan, the author of a dozen novels, including Snow Angels, Last Night at the Lobster, and A Prayer for the Dying, among other books; and fiction writer David Schickler, the author of Kissing in Manhattan and Sweet and Vicious.

This year’s nonfiction judges include Lee Martin, author of the memoirs, From Our House and Turning the Bones, and several works of fiction, including The Bright Forever, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Rachel Simon, whose works include a novel, The Magic Touch, and two memoirs, Riding the Bus with My Sister, and Building a Home with My Husband; and Danielle Trussoni, whose memoir, Falling Through the Earth, was named one of the best books of 2006 by the New York Times, and whose first novel, Angelology, will be published in March.

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