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 late Peter Matthiessen's last novel follows a fractious group of attendees at an Auschwitz memorial conference as they bear witness to one of history's greatest atrocities.
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Emma Donoghue's new novel is a rich, raunchy tale of demimondaines and murder in smallpox-riven 1876 San Francisco. Critic Alan Cheuse says the novel sets a jaunty pace and shows a lot of leg.
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Susan Rieger's new The Divorce Papers is a modern epistolary novel, chronicling a crumbling marriage in court filings, emails and hand-written notes. Critic Alan Cheuse calls it serious yet charming.
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Joyce Carol Oates' new Carthage explores the familiar but important territory of family anguish. Oates has written more than 40 novels — critic Alan Cheuse praises her prodigious imagination, and says her latest effort is a "roller coaster, demon-twister" of a ride.
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An amazing book has surfaced from behind the Soviet-era Iron Curtain says our reviewer, Alan Cheuse. The book is Autobiography of a Corpse by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky.
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Jeanette Winterson's The Daylight Gate follows the witches and outcasts of 17th century England. The titular gate is a portal to hell — but England itself has become hellish for persecuted Catholics.
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The novel Shaman, by science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson is a coming of age novel set in the ice age. Reviewer Alan Cheuse says it is the latest to take up the question of what it was like to live 30,000 years ago on the cusp of change from Neanderthal to Cro-Magnon dominance of the human world.
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Alan Cheuse reviews The Woman Who Lost Her Soul by Bob Shacochis. The author's first novel in twenty years traverses the globe and spans decades, and is engaging for all 700-plus pages.
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Alan Cheuse reviews the last book written by David Rakoff, who died last year. The novel Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish is written in verse.