Alan Cheuse

Book Review: 'Submergence'

Alan Cheuse — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 20:38:00 +0000

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The writer J.M. Ledgard leads multiple lives. He's a journalist and covers East Africa for the Economist, but Ledgard is also a novelist.

Book Review: 'Where Tigers Are At Home'

Alan Cheuse — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 21:39:00 +0000

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And I'm Audie Cornish. Our book reviewer, Alan Cheuse, has just traveled to Brazil and back in an 800-page novel. The book is called "Where Tigers Are At Home." It's by a French novelist named Jean-Marie Blas de Robles and it's just out in English. Here's Alan's review.

ALAN CHEUSE, BYLINE: A Frenchman named Von Wogau, a divorced and retired journalist, lives in a small town in the northeastern region of Brazil.

Under Ogawa's Macabre, Metafictional Spell

Alan Cheuse — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 18:20:00 +0000

It used to be a truism among critics of British poetry that Keats and most of his fellow Romantic poets worked in the shadow of John Milton. I'm not making a perfect analogy when I suggest that most contemporary Japanese writers seem to be working under the shadow of Haruki Murakami, but I hope it highlights the spirit of the situation.

You certainly get that feeling of being haunted by Murakami when you begin reading the "Eleven Dark Tales," as she calls them, in this story cycle by Yoko Ogawa. The situations seem made for Murakami's particular blend of the real and the fantastic.

A Wintry Mix: Alan Cheuse Selects The Season's Best

Alan Cheuse — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 19:48:00 +0000

It's that time of year again — the leaves have fallen, the dark comes early, the air brings with it a certain chill — and I've been piling up books on my reading table, books I've culled from the offerings of the past few months, which because of their essential lyric beauty and power stand as special gifts for you and yours.

They sometimes seem at odds, the lyrical impulse and the narrative impulse.

Book Review: 'Dear Life'

Alan Cheuse — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 21:40:00 +0000

Critic Alan Cheuse says Canadian short story writer Alice Munro's new collection, Dear Life: Stories, is both arresting and worth reading.

A Midcentury Romance, With 'Sunlight' And 'Shadow'

Alan Cheuse — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 20:16:00 +0000

New York, New York, it's a wonderful town! And Mark Helprin's new near-epic novel makes it all the more marvelous. It's got great polarized motifs — war and peace, heroism and cowardice, crime and civility, pleasure and business, love and hate, bias and acceptance — which the gifted novelist weaves into a grand, old-fashioned romance, a New York love story that begins with a Hollywoodish meet-cute on the Staten Island Ferry.

"To be in New York on a beautiful day is to feel razor-close to being in love," Helprin writes.

Book Review: 'God Carlos'

Alan Cheuse — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 21:36:00 +0000

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From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Audie Cornish.

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And I'm Melissa Block. Now to the 16th Century and the Spanish port of Cadiz. It's the setting for "God Carlos," a new novel by Jamaican-born writer Anthony Winkler, who takes us on a voyage to the New World.

Book Review: 'The Renegades'

Alan Cheuse — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 21:00:00 +0000

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A woman plays the hero in a new military thriller set in Afghanistan. Author Tom Young served there and in Iraq as a flight engineer for the Air National Guard.

Sail Into Summer With Novel Picks From Alan Cheuse

Alan Cheuse — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 12:23:00 +0000

Head to the bookstore or pick up your Nook or Kindle or iPad, and prepare, if you will, to make some decisions about your summer reading life. My suggestions this year tend to be fine new fiction, the kind that not only flows on the page but also makes a sort of music in your mind. So, word music it is! Strike up the orchestra! It's going to be a big summer for big broad American literary voices, voices that leap from the page and linger with you, echo through your summer and perhaps even beyond.

Review: 'These Dreams Of You'

Alan Cheuse — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 19:00:00 +0000

Although it starts out as a seemingly conventional novel, These Dreams of You by Steve Erickson gradually becomes experimental fiction as the plot turns on a series of improbable coincidences. Alan Cheuse, who teaches writing at George Mason University, has a review.