Alan Cheuse

How To Put This 'Delicate'-ly ... Not Le Carre's Best Work

Alan Cheuse — Thu, 16 May 2013 11:03:00 +0000

Some novelists interest us because they turn the light of a style we enjoy on whatever subject they take up. Some novelists we enjoy because they have found a great subject and work it well and lovingly. John le Carre seems to belong to the latter group, having found his vein of fiction gold in the world of Cold War espionage.

Book Review: 'Submergence'

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

Transcript

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

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

Transcript

MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

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.

Hamid's How-To For Success, 'Filthy Rich' In Irony

Alan Cheuse — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 18:01:00 +0000

Novelist Mohsin Hamid lives in Lahore, Pakistan, quite some distance from the Long Island of Jay Gatsby. But his new novel — his third and, I think, best so far — reminded me of F. Scott Fitzgerald's quintessential American work. As I read this novel about the dark and light of success in a world of social instability, I kept asking myself how much I might be inflating the value of Hamid's novel by rating it so highly.

Lost In Everett's Hall Of Metafictional Mirrors

Alan Cheuse — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 12:03:00 +0000

A friend of mine, with more than half a lifetime in the business of writing and a following of devoted fans, some years ago nailed a sign on the wall above his writing desk.

TELL THE [Expletive] STORY!

How I wish Percival Everett looked up every now and then from his keyboard to see a sign like this.

Everett is one of the most gifted and versatile of contemporary writers, with over 20 works of fiction to his name, novels and stories that show us our own country at an angle just slightly tilted toward the antic.

Brutality, Balkan Style In A Satiric 'Stone City'

Alan Cheuse — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 12:03:00 +0000

From Swift to Orwell, political satire has played a major role in the history of European fiction. Much of it takes on an allegorical cast, but not all. The Fall of the Stone City, an incisive, biting work by Ismail Kadare — one of Europe's reigning fiction masters — refines our understanding of satire's nature. Kadare's instructive and delightful book takes us from the 1943 Nazi occupation of a provincial Albanian town, the ancient stone city of Gjirokaster, to the consolidation of communist rule there a decade later.

Under Ogawa's Macabre, Metafictional Spell

Alan Cheuse — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 12:03:00 +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.

Harrison's New Novellas Present Men In Full

Alan Cheuse — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 12:03:00 +0000

Two years have gone by since I first suggested to President Obama that he create a new Cabinet post, and appoint distinguished fiction writer Jim Harrison as secretary for quality of life.

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.

Munro Weighs The Twists And Turns Of This 'Dear Life'

Alan Cheuse — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 17:56:00 +0000

More than a dozen short-story collections since Canada's Alice Munro published her first book, and she now seems as much an institution as any living writer. We count on her for a particular variety of short story, the sort that gives us so much life within the bounds of a single tale that it nourishes us almost as much as a novel does.

The U.S. master of short fiction, Bernard Malamud, used to say that a short story predicates, that is, points us toward a life in all its fullness.