Stewart will be chatting with Book World Editor, Ron Charles in an exclusive video interview on Feb 24 about The Washington Post Book Club’s fiction pick for February, West of Sunset. Readers are invited to submit their questions for Stewart using #WestofSunset in the comments section on the Facebook page and over Twitter.
Author Stewart O’Nan, who wrote the 2001 book The Circus Fire: A True Story of an American Tragedy, and Mike Skidgell, whose new book, The Hartford Circus Fire, spoke to a standing room only crowd of more than 200 Sunday afternoon.
The stories of that steamy summer day are horrifying.
With the Big Top filled with people, animals and performers and the afternoon matinee underway, a fire started at one end of the massive tent and spread rapidly.
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From The Washington Post’s Style Blog:
Some investors reacted negatively to Friday’s announcement that Darden will sell the Red Lobster restaurant chain to a private equity firm for $2.1 billion.
Wall Street bankers and lawyers can argue over the wisdom of dumping the seafood restaurants for quick cash — but leave it to a novelist to consider the real cost for workers as they’re forced to deal with the upheaval of new corporate management.
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Stewart will be giving a reading at Writers in Paradise on Thursday, January 23, with Lori Roy. Below is the full schedule
Saturday, January 18
Tim O’Brien with Q&A moderated by Dennis Lehane
Sunday, January 19
Dennis Lehane and Andre Dubus III
Monday, January 20
Jon Chopan and Les Standiford
Tuesday, January 21
Laura Williams McCaffrey and Peter Meinke
Wednesday, January 22*
NO READINGS
Thursday, January 23
Lori Roy and Stewart O’Nan
Friday, January 24
Ann Hood and Sterling Watson
Saturday, January 25
Laura Lippman and Attica Locke
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This post will be updated as new reviews come in.
“The Odds” is a comedy, but a rueful one that anyone who’s ever stayed up late wondering how to pay the bills or if a marriage was worth saving will recognize.
O’Nan weaves in vivid descriptions of the falls’ natural wonders and the cheesy attractions. (Art insists on touring Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Museum, as they did on their honeymoon.) O’Nan is never condescending, ever sympathetic to his main characters.
O’Nan’s prose is agile, light and utterly unself-conscious. Very contemporary. At the same time, his superb rendering of psychological drama recalls 19th-century novelists like George Eliot. He has good fun with this story.
Released late last month, The Odds is a crisp 180 pages with plenty of humour and O’Nan’s sharp dialogue (a chapter where the couple believes they see Nancy Wilson of Heart at a local restaurant shows O’Nan’s impeccable grasp of characters). But all throughout is the ominous feeling something bad is about to happen to them, which is only natural when happiness rides on red or black at the roulette table.
NPR Books
Fired And Foreclosed: Unemployment Lit
Stewart O’Nan is an unfailingly smart and affecting novelist, but never more so, I think, than when he writes about the economic struggles of ordinary folks. His great 2007 novella, Last Night at the Lobster, is about the last shift at a closing seafood restaurant in a crummy New England mall. Now, O’Nan has just published a powerful new novella about the unemployed called The Odds.
The Works of Stewart O'Nan 