Category Archives: News

Happy Halloween, from ScreenRant and The Week

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The Night Country is listed as one of ten best Halloween books, via ScreenRant and Reddit. In fine company with the likes of Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, and Bram Stoker!

Ghosts and Halloween are a winning combination, and Stewart O’Nan’s The Night Country found a clever new way to blend the two together. Reddit user bittybro gave a great rundown of their favorite Halloween book when writing, “The Night Country by Stuart O’Nan. Ghost story that takes place on Halloween. Told from the POV of the ghosts.”

https://screenrant.com/best-spooky-halloween-books-reddit/

And from The Week, the novelist Elizabeth McCracken lists A Prayer for the Dying as one of her “favorite novels of the past 25 years”:

A Prayer for the Dying by Stewart O’Nan (1999)

This is one of my favorite novels of the past 25 years — about a small Wisconsin town hemmed in by a diphtheria epidemic on one side and wildfire on the other. When I have students who want to write a book in the second person, this is where I steer them: the finest example I know, a tour de force.

https://theweek.com/book-list/1017117/elizabeth-mccracken-6-favorite-books-that-tackle-tough-topics

In Alum Stewart O’Nan’s Ocean State, Teenage Passion Turns Deadly

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Check out the in-depth article on Ocean State in Bostonia, Boston University’s Alumni Magazine!

“When I was in eighth grade my sister helped kill another girl.” 

So begins Stewart O’Nan’s latest novel, Ocean State, a taut, deeply empathic exploration of a teenage love triangle with devastating consequences. 

“In writing the book, I wanted to be able to convey the feeling of what it feels like to be headlong, wildly, in love and how wretched and destroyed you can feel from love,” says O’Nan (ENG’83). “It’s a love story, not a murder story or a thriller.” 

[more]

https://www.bu.edu/articles/2022/stewart-onan-new-book-ocean-state/