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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Book critic Alan Cheuse reviews Jim Harrison's new collection of novellas, The River Swimmer.
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Critic Alan Cheuse reviews the new novel by British novelist Sebastian Faulks, called A Possible Life: A Novel in Five Parts.
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Critic Alan Cheuse maps out a winter wonderland of fiction and poetry — from ancient Greece to the near-future visions of Walter Mosley, a selection of the best books to give and receive this holiday season. Cheuse says these five books strike the perfect balance between lyricism and narrative. -
Critic Alan Cheuse says Canadian short story writer Alice Munro's new collection, Dear Life: Stories, is both arresting and worth reading.
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Critic Alan Cheuse sends us into the cosmos with his review of Bowl of Heaven by Gregory Benford and Larry Niven.
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Swedish writer Karin Tidbeck's debut story collection, Jagannath, is suffused with the myths of her homeland — and the American oddities she picked up as a student here. Reviewer Alan Cheuse says the stories are weird — but it's a good kind of weird.
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When aspiring Broadway actress Catherine and World War II vet Harry first lock eyes on the Staten Island Ferry, everything changes — but their lives together won't be easy. Mark Helprin delivers an old-fashioned love story, and an ode to 1940s New York, in his novel In Sunlight and in Shadow.
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The new historical novel God Carlos by Anthony C. Winkler is set in the early sixteenth century.
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The Renegades is a brutal true-to-life novel about war in Afghanistan, written by Tom Young, a member of the National Guard.
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Alan Cheuse reviews a collection of science fiction short stories by Kij Johnson, "At the Mouth of the River of Bees."
