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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With the "pace and feel of an exploded documentary," says review Alan Cheuse, Don Winslow recounts a 10-year odyssey of revenge set in Mexico against the stark history of the drug wars.
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Norman Lock's new novel takes readers on a breathlessly-paced tour of the Old West, from the point of view of a former Civil War bugle boy who tags along with some of the era's legendary characters.
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Jami Attenberg's new novel is based on a real woman, Mazie Phillips Gordon, who took tickets at a grimy New York City movie house and cared for decades' worth of the down-and-outs who came her way.
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Steve Stern's slice of the mythical South is the Pinch, a hardscrabble immigrant neighborhood of northwest Memphis where the Torah trumps the King James Bible and the rabbis have magical powers.
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Edna O'Brien's first novel was burned in the small Irish village of her birth. The Love Object collects more than 30 of her fiery tales of religion and repression in "a land of sacrificial women."
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NPR's Alan Cheuse reviews author Rachel Kushner's collection of short stories, The Strange Case of Rachel K.
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Fatima Bhutto (niece of assassinated Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto) has written several volumes of nonfiction and poetry; her first novel is a delicate but tense political thriller.
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The Peruvian Nobel Prize-winning writer, Mario Vargas Llosa, has a new novel out, and he's not resting on his laurels. It's an ambitious and weighty novel that's worth the effort.
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Thomas McGuane's new story collection gives us a large cast of Big Sky dreamers, schemers and down-and-outs. Reviewer Alan Cheuse says it's a fascinating portrait of the state — with bonus bears.
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Reviewer Alan Cheuse has rapturous praise for Edith Pearlman's new story collection: "The first thing I wanted to do after finishing was, well, I wanted to go right back and start from the beginning."