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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The coming-of-age story isn't new, but a couple of new novels based on this theme stand out. Alan Cheuse reviews Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen, by Susan Gregg Gilmore, and The Flowers, by Dagoberto Gilb.
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A captivating English translation of Jiang Rong's award-winning novel chronicles a Beijing student's immersion with nomadic farmers of the Mongolian grasslands just before China's Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and '70s. The story becomes a passionate eulogy to a ferocious and far-flung way life, and to the wolf, the foremost predator of the grasslands.
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Jerome Charyn's latest novel, Johnny One-Eye: A Tale of the American Revolution begins in 1776 with Gen. George Washington sparing the book's protagonist from the noose.
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Canadian writer Frances Itani's novel Remembering the Bones recounts an old woman's struggle for survival after plunging her car down a ravine. Itani's main character has been invited to lunch with Queen Elizabeth — but she ends up facing days and nights crawling away from the wreck, recalling all the while her long life in small-town Ontario.
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Alan Cheuse makes a prediction for forthcoming novels from John Grisham and Stephen King. Grisham's The Appeal centers on a $41 million jury award to a Mississippi woman whose family died at the hands of a chemical company; King's Duma Key features an evil genie who goes after a man in the Florida Keys.
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In 1940, Chicago-based author Richard Wright published Native Son, sparking a 20-year run of trailblazing for other African-American writers. Wright died of a heart attack in Paris in the autumn of 1960, leaving behind an unfinished novel, which his daughter is now publishing.
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Modern Los Angeles serves as the setting for 13 stories in a new book from writer and poet Wanda Coleman. The collection is called Jazz & Twelve O'Clock Tales: New Stories.
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On the short list for this year's Man Booker Prize for Fiction was a novel by New Zealand writer Lloyd Jones. The brilliant and compelling Mister Pip is set on a remote South Pacific island called Bougainville as civil war breaks out.
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Novelist Geraldine Brooks, poet Robert Hass, Western essayist William Kittredge: from critic Alan Cheuse, an array of books to keep winter's chill and the ever-earlier dark at bay — at least in the circle of light by the reader's chair.
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Alabama native Michael Knight has published a timely book. His pair of novellas, collected under the title The Holiday Season, tell the story of families weathering Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Eve.