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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Alan Cheuse reviews Lila, a new novel from Marilynne Robinson that is a prequel to her earlier books and has been shortlisted for the National Book Award.
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Italo Calvino's Into the War and Philip K. Dick's We Can Remember It for You Wholesale, two posthumously published books of short fiction, contrast greatly but deliver stimulating reading experiences.
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Martin Amis' latest novel, which takes place in Auschwitz, has already stirred up controversy in Europe according to the New York Times. But reviewer Alan Cheuse calls it the triumph of Amis' career.
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It's a cliche at this point to talk about how incredibly prolific Joyce Carol Oates is; critic Alan Cheuse says it's not the quantity but the quality — and her latest story collection is wonderful.
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Veteran cartoonist Jules Feiffer has just written his first graphic novel, the noirish Kill My Mother. Reviewer Alan Cheuse is discovering graphic novels equally late, but still finds it a good read.
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Richard Flanagan's new novel follows a Tasmanian-born doctor, captured by the Japanese during WWII, who ends up caring for prisoners of war working on the notorious "Death Railway."
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Charles Cumming hooks NPR book reviewer Alan Cheuse with his latest spy novel, A Colder War. It's a tense and tangled tale of a British agent hunting the truth behind a mysterious death in Istanbul.
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Kamila Shamsie's tale of a young Englishwoman's entanglement with the people and mountains of Peshawar is an epic tale stretching from ancient Persia to the waning days of the British Empire.
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Amy Bloom's new novel follows two half-sisters from a disastrous stint in 1920s Hollywood, to happiness with an unexpected, impromptu family group in the disruptive years around World War II.
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Alan Cheuse reviews A Replacement Life, Boris Fishman's humorous account of Holocaust survivors in today's New York.