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 Sympathy for the Devil, Four Decades of Friendship with Gore Vidal by Michael Mewshaw.
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Tim Johnston's suspenseful novel follows a family that begins to come apart after their teenage daughter is abducted during a mountain vacation. Critic Alan Cheuse says his heart is still pounding.
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Based on the real-life story of Tawana Brawley (and Al Sharpton), The Sacrifice depicts the fractures in a fictional New Jersey town after a young black girl accuses white cops of assaulting her.
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For the holidays, critic Alan Cheuse is making up a list of books to give to each of his family members. Only the best of 2014 for them. Here are his picks.
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Haruki Murakami's 2008 novella about a young student trapped in an eerie library has just been translated into English. Critic Alan Cheuse calls it awfully weird and utterly down to earth.
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Ron Rash's latest collects 34 of his best short stories; critic Alan Cheuse says they're searingly beautiful, "as if someone has taken a stick from a blazing fire and pressed it into your hand."
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Somali author Nuruddin Farah's new novel follows a glamorous photographer who takes in her brother's children after he dies in a terrorist bombing. Reviewer Alan Cheuse calls it complex yet uplifting.