West of Sunset in O Magazine and Elle

Posted on January 21, 2015 by SJW

West of Sunset has been named as one of the “Ten Titles to Pick Up Now” in O Magazine for January 2015!

omagazine201501 West of Sunset is also featured in this month’s Elle Magazine — The Elle’s Lettres 2015 Readers’ Prize!

elle201501 Also, Stewart will be at University Club tonight for two events:

A Reception with Stewart O’Nan

Start: 01/21/2015 5:30 pm

End: 01/21/2015 6:30 pm

Before his public reading, join Stewart O’Nan for a private reception–limited to 20 people–at the University Club. Reception admission includes a copy of O’Nan’s new novel, delicious appetizers, and a cash bar. Proceeds benefit Fitzgerald in Saint Paul. Reservations and payment are required in advance. To reserve your spot, contact Stu Wilson at stu@fitzgeraldinsaintpaul.org or call 651-253-3231.

Stewart O’Nan reads from “West of Sunset” at the University Club

Start: 01/21/2015 7:00 pm

University Club
420 Summit Ave
Saint Paul, Minnesota 55102

Reviews of West of Sunset from The Boston Globe and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Posted on January 18, 2015 by SJW

‘West of Sunset’ by Stewart O’Nan

By Ted Weesner

How, in Fitzgerald’s own words, did he crack up? And why has no one dramatically gone to this fertile place before? Thankfully, in his 15th novel, “West of Sunset,” Stewart O’Nan has inserted himself into this fecund mess and rather shockingly — at least for this formerly historical-fiction-phobic reviewer — exits with a mesmerizing and haunting novel of his own.

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‘West of Sunset’: Pittsburgh’s Stewart O’Nan tells a sympathetic tale of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final years in Hollywood

By Eileen Weiner

With each new novel, the prolific and protean Stewart O’Nan surprises us again. Through his seemingly limitless imagination, we have come to know, and to care about, a woman on Oklahoma’s death row with a tale to tell; the oddball crew working the final night at a failing Red Lobster in Connecticut; a paralyzed African-American teenager and his struggling community in Pittsburgh’s East Liberty; and an 80-year-old Pittsburgh widow confronting the travails of aging and loneliness.

Despite wildly different tones and approaches, the Pittsburgh writer’s books are united by his compassion for his characters and careful attention to the details that define and reveal their lives and souls.

These traits are much in evidence in the author’s latest surprise, a biographical novel about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last years, when he was desperately trying to halt the downward spiral of his professional and personal lives by working as a scriptwriter in Hollywood.

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Reviews of West of Sunset from Tweed’s, HuffPo, and Chicago Tribune

Posted on January 15, 2015 by SJW

Considering the abundance of material by and about Fitzgerald, it might be reasonable to ask what a novelization of his life might offer. The answer, like Fitzgerald’s best writing, is simple and beautiful—it’s an amazing story. Focusing on the final years of his life, Stewart O’Nan’s remarkable new novel, West of Sunset, shows Fitzgerald in Hollywood hoping to engender that elusive “second act.”

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In his new novel West of Sunset, Stewart O’Nan imagines Fitzgerald’s last years with passionate intensity (and I do not use the phrase with W.B. Yeats’s negative edge). Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald have long been subjected to fictionalized autobiography, in poor Zelda’s case less historical fiction than what I call, with dismay, hysterical fiction. Such novels often claim to be thoroughly researched – a paradoxical claim for fiction. Some are well-written and engaging, and some are awful, simply capitalizing on the golden Fitzgerald name. West of Sunset does not invoke that name. Its cover does not feature famous faces, but evokes Hollywood of the Golden Years, foregrounded by an old typewriter (Fitzgerald hand-wrote, but, in Hollywood, appreciated the plentifully-availably typists). Within, O’Nan has made not only a good novel, but a sensitive, sad tribute to a writer he clearly loves.

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O’Nan, author of more than a dozen works of fiction, skillfully pulls us into Fitzgerald’s gilded and yet familiar world. He brings the Hollywood legends to life. By the end, they feel like friends, one of O’Nan’s aims.

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Casting F. Scott Fitzgerald in Stewart O’Nan’s West of Sunset

Posted on January 15, 2015 by SJW

Arguably the greatest American writer of the twentieth century – perhaps in history – F. Scott Fitzgerald was as complex, compelling, and ultimately tragic as any character in his legendary body of work. Stewart O’Nan’s latest novel, West of Sunset, is a nuanced, witty, and moving chronicle of the troubled author’s final years living amid the decadence of Hollywood during the golden age of cinema.

In 1937, F. Scott Fitzgerald was well beyond his years of greatest success. In financial and emotional freefall, the alcoholic Fitzgerald made his way to Hollywood to fulfill a screenwriting contract with Metro Goldwyn Mayer. Despite his sometimes crippling doubts about the state of his creative abilities and the ongoing turmoil in his relationship with his wife, Zelda, Fitzgerald remained of captivating charm even if it was little more than a facade. Given the timeless nature of Fitzgerald’s body of work, the stranger-than-fiction nature of his final years, and his literary stature, West of Sunset is a semi-fictionalized biography ripe for adaptation. Let’s take a look at some possible casting choices, shall we?

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Review of West of Sunset from The Washington Post

Posted on January 14, 2015 by SJW

By Maureen Corrigan

… That grim yet undeniably fascinating last act of Fitzgerald’s life is the subject of Stewart O’Nan’s gorgeous new novel, “West of Sunset.” As he has demonstrated in “Last Night at the Lobster” and “Emily, Alone,” O’Nan is a writer alert to the courage and beauty inherent in the stories of people who simply have to keep on keeping on. What interests him about Fitzgerald’s exile in Hollywood is not so much the glitter (although Humphrey Bogart, Marlene Dietrich and other stars make appearances), nor his love affair with gossip columnist Sheilah Graham (whose blond good looks evoked the young Zelda), but rather Fitzgerald’s anxious commitment to his work as a screenwriter. Most of the movies Fitzgerald was assigned to were dreck (although there was a short stint on “Gone with the Wind”). Nevertheless, sitting down every day in his office or the various furnished cottages and apartments he rented in and around Hollywood, Fitzgerald fueled himself with cigarettes and Cokes (or, frequently, something more potent) as he labored to make flimsy scripts better. Fitzgerald was always a worrier, relentlessly tinkering with “The Great Gatsby” and “Tender Is the Night,” even after the publication of those novels. It’s that F. Scott Fitzgerald — the worn-out yet relentless craftsman — whom O’Nan compassionately evokes in “West of Sunset.”

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