Writer’s Reading Stewart O’Nan

Hear from an author who just might be “our best working novelist.” In a February piece for Salon.com, fellow writer Jonathan Evison posed that question and went on to describe Stewart O’Nan as “a guy who writes spectacularly without an ounce of pretension” about “the people nobody else is writing about.”

Selected by Granta as one of America’s Best Young Novelists in 1995, O’Nan has earned enthusiastic praise for over a dozen novels, among them Snow Angels (1994), Wish You Were Here (2002), Last Night at the Lobster (2007), Songs for the Missing (2008), Emily, Alone (2011), and, most recently, The Odds: A Love Story (2012). A baseball fan who grew up and currently lives in Pittsburgh, O’Nan also coauthored Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season (2004) with Stephen King.

O’Nan signs books in the Wexner Center Store following the reading. Click through for more information about the author.

Cosponsored by Ohio State’s Creative Writing Program in the Department of English. Born in 1961, O’Nan received an undergraduate degree from Boston University (where he became a Red Sox fan). He worked briefly as an engineer, then returned to college to study writing, receiving a MFA from Cornell University in 1992.

O’Nan was awarded a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship in Fiction in 1995, having published a collection of short stories, In the Walled City (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993), and a novel, Snow Angels (Doubleday, 1994). His subsequent novels are The Names of the Dead (Doubleday, 1996), The Speed Queen (Doubleday, 1997), A World Away (Doubleday, 1998), A Prayer for the Dying (Henry Holt, 1999), Everyday People (Grove Press, 2001), Wish You Were Here (Grove Press, 2002), The Night Country (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003), The Good Wife (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005), Last Night at the Lobster (Viking, 2007), Songs for the Missing (Viking, 2008), Emily, Alone (Viking, 2011), and The Odds: A Love Story (Viking, 2012). He has also written two books of nonfiction—The Circus Fire (Doubleday, 2000) and Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season (with Stephen King) (Scribner, 2004)—and a screenplay, Poe (Lonely Road Books, 2008), based on the life of Edgar Allan Poe.