Writers Read: Michael O'Donnell

Wednesday, April 22, 2026

Michael O'Donnell

Michael O’Donnell is the author of the bestselling novel Above the Fire and the new novel Concert Black. In 2023, Apple Books named him a debut writer to watch.

His essays and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, The American Scholar, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and many other publications. A longtime member of the National Book Critics Circle, he practiced law in government and the private sector for over twenty years after clerking for a federal judge. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Indiana University and his law degree from Boston College. O’Donnell lives with his family in the Chicago area.

Recently I asked the author about what he was reading. O'Donnell's reply:

I always seem to be reading too many books, evenly divided between fiction and non-fiction. I’m thoroughly enjoying Michael Crummey’s The Adversary, a wonderful novel about a pair of nemesis siblings—a crude, violent brother and a brilliant, amoral sister—living on a remote coast of Newfoundland in the early nineteenth century. I recently found myself traveling without a book to read and its brilliant cover design and sparkling first page jumped out at me in a local bookstore. It reminds me a good deal of Ian McGuire’s The North Water, a remarkable novel from 2016 about physical and spiritual warfare on a whaler during the age of sail.

Crummey has also clearly been influenced by Cormac McCarthy’s prose (“His father was unaccustomed to circumstances that resisted his influence and he swung wildly and uselessly in his strategies to correct the wayward youngster.”) As it happens, I’m just coming to the end of McCarthy’s Suttree—the last of his novels that I’ve read, and also the longest and the funniest. It has taken a while to get through, but I’m glad to have stuck with it, as the final quarter has some of McCarthy’s loveliest writing. I have supplemented the physical book with an excellent audiobook recording narrated by Richard Poe.

I recently finished Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a devastating novel about prisoners of war under Japanese control during World War Two. Flanagan writes with quiet moral force and lovely turns of phrase, and I have read several of his books over the past year.

On the non-fiction side, I recently finished Tom Junod’s extraordinary memoir In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be A Man, which I wrote about for The Wall Street Journal. Junod’s father Lou was as complicated as a character in a Saul Bellow novel, a surging metropolis of outrageous contradictions and pathos. I predict this exceptional book will make several best-of lists at the end of 2026. Finally, I recently finished The Last Kings of Hollywood, by Paul Fischer, a smart and entertaining account of Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas in the 1970s, which I wrote about for The Atlantic.

Finally, I am reading Allison Hoover Bartlett’s The Man Who Loved Books Too Much. As this summary shows, it is for me a cautionary tale.