Alan Cheuse
Alan Cheuse died on July 31, 2015. He had been in a car accident in California earlier in the month. He was 75. Listen to NPR Special Correspondent Susan Stamburg's retrospective on his life and career.
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Alan Cheuse has been reviewing books on All Things Considered since the 1980s. His challenge is to make each two-minute review as fresh and interesting as possible while focusing on the essence of the book itself.
Formally trained as a literary scholar, Cheuse writes fiction and novels and publishes short stories. He is the author of five novels, five collections of short stories and novellas, and the memoir Fall Out of Heaven. His prize-winning novel To Catch the Lightning is an exploration of the intertwined plights of real-life frontier photographer Edward Curtis and the American Indian. His latest work of book-length fiction is the novel Song of Slaves in the Desert, which tells the story of a Jewish rice plantation-owning family in South Carolina and the Africans they enslave. His latest collection of short fiction is An Authentic Captain Marvel Ring and Other Stories. With Caroline Marshall, he has edited two volumes of short stories. A new version of his 1986 novel The Grandmothers' Club will appear in March, 2015 as Prayers for the Living.
With novelist Nicholas Delbanco, Cheuse wrote Literature: Craft & Voice, a major new introduction to literary study. Cheuse's short fiction has appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, The Antioch Review, Ploughshares, and The Southern Review. His essay collection, Listening to the Page, appeared in 2001.
Cheuse teaches writing at George Mason University, spends his summers in Santa Cruz, California, and leads fiction workshops at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. He earned his Ph.D. in comparative literature with a focus on Latin American literature from Rutgers University.
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James Salter is a master prose stylist whose deceptively simple sentences reveal the sensations and truth of experience. In All That Is, he conjures the life and times of Philip Bowman, who, returning to New York after World War II, pursues love and a publishing career, with unequal success.
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Jean-Marie Blas de Robles' novel Where Tigers Are at Home won France's 2008 Prix Medicis. It's now out in English, and reviewer Alan Cheuse says it will appeal to readers who like the complexity of Umberto Eco, with "an adventure plot straight out of Michael Crichton."
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Alan Cheuse reviews Where Tigers Are At Home by Jean-Marie Blas de Robles.
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Mohsin Hamid's How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia presents itself as a how-to manual for success in South Asia. The story of a street urchin's corrupt path to prosperity, the novel puts critic Alan Cheuse in mind of that quintessential American story of an unscrupulous striver, The Great Gatsby.
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Fiction is reality and reality fiction in Revenge, Yoko Ogawa's absorbing cycle of interlinked, eerie tales. Readers may detect the shadows of Murakami, Borges and Poe, but, says critic Alan Cheuse, Ogawa's delicious tales cast their own singular spell.
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The confounding title of the self-referential novel Percival Everett by Virgil Russell signals its method, which seeks to erase lines between author and subject, reality and fiction. For Alan Cheuse, Percival Everett's (or is that Percival Everett's?) postmodern mind games spoil what might have been a fine novel.
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No good deed goes unpunished, and no one escapes Ismail Kadare's satire in this madcap indictment of Balkan totalitarianism. Set in Albania during WWII and its aftermath, The Fall of the Stone City is an incisive, biting work by a master of dark comedy.
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Book critic Alan Cheuse reviews Jim Harrison's new collection of novellas, The River Swimmer.
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The writer, who died this week at the age of 88, is remembered for creations both fictional and non, ranging from the Kansas City living room of Mrs. Bridge to Custer's Little Bighorn. Critic Alan Cheuse has a remembrance of Connell, who once met him for breakfast at a Marin County McDonald's. -
Alan Cheuse reviews a new collection of novellas by Jim Harrison, whom he calls "the reigning master of the form." Harrison, author of Legends of the Fall, is back with his sixth book of novellas, focusing on men in different stages of life.
