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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NPR's Alan Cheuse reviews author Rachel Kushner's collection of short stories, The Strange Case of Rachel K.
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Fatima Bhutto (niece of assassinated Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto) has written several volumes of nonfiction and poetry; her first novel is a delicate but tense political thriller.
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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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Alan Cheuse reviews A Replacement Life, Boris Fishman's humorous account of Holocaust survivors in today's New York.
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Alan Cheuse reviews Kalyan Ray's new novel, No Country. It's a family drama that crosses continents and time, from the U.S. to Ireland to India over 150 years.
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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.
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Canadian writer Annabel Lyon has a special gift when it comes to time travel. Her new novel The Sweet Girl carries us back to ancient Greece, where a teenage girl learns from her philosopher father and fights for her safety in a dangerous world. Reviewer Alan Cheuse says the novel is a triumph.
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Book critic Alan Cheuse has a review of A Nearly Perfect Copy by Allison Amend.
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Mohsin Hamid's How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia presents itself as a how-to manual for success in South Asia. The story of a street urchin's corrupt path to prosperity, the novel puts critic Alan Cheuse in mind of that quintessential American story of an unscrupulous striver, The Great Gatsby.