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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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 Angels Make Their Hope Here, by Breena Clarke.
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James Carroll's experience as a Catholic priest informs his new Warburg in Rome, which follows an American tasked with rescuing European Jews in the aftermath of the Nazi occupation of Rome.
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The famed writer of Westerns uses his first novel in five years to blow a few holes in the myths surrounding the shootout at the OK Corral. Reviewer Alan Cheuse calls it "a peach of a book."
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Anthony Doerr's new novel, All The Light We Cannot See, follows a blind French girl and a young German private after the Normandy invasion — but his gorgeous prose is marred by jagged jumps in time.
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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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Nicole Mones' new Night in Shanghai follows an African-American pianist making his way in the city's nightclub scene on the eve of World War II. Reviewer Alan Cheuse says the story really swings.
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Lorrie Moore's new collection, Bark, contains eight stories — but our reviewer Alan Cheuse says only two of them really stand out. But, he adds, those two offer some "first-rate reading pleasure."
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Robert Harris' new An Officer and a Spy is a fictionalized account of the Dreyfus Affair — which, as critic Alan Cheuse notes, is tailor made for Harris' talents: there's an innocent victim at the center, a melodramatic villain, buffoonish military brass, crusading newspaper editors and a star turn from the novelist Emile Zola.
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Roddy Doyle's new The Guts revisits the Commitments three decades later, grown up and dealing with life's blows. Mastermind Jimmy Rabbitte is out of the hospital after cancer surgery, and he's living life one day at a time. Critic Alan Cheuse says the dialogue-heavy novel is both foulmouthed and bursting with joie de vivre.