Book Review: 'Dear Life'
Critic Alan Cheuse says Canadian short story writer Alice Munro's new collection, Dear Life: Stories, is both arresting and worth reading.
View ArticleA Wintry Mix: Alan Cheuse Selects The Season's Best
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...
View ArticleRevisiting A Sad Yet Hopeful Winter's Tale In 'The Snow Child'
A sad tale's best for winter, as Shakespeare wrote.
View ArticleHarrison's New Novellas Present Men In Full
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.
View ArticleUnder Ogawa's Macabre, Metafictional Spell
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...
View ArticleBrutality, Balkan Style In A Satiric 'Stone City'
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...
View ArticleLost In Everett's Hall Of Metafictional Mirrors
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]...
View ArticleHamid's How-To for Success, 'Filthy Rich' In Irony
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...
View ArticleBook Review: 'Where Tigers Are At Home'
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...
View ArticleTigers, Scholars And Smugglers, All 'At Home' In Sprawling Novel
It's difficult to predict the reception Where Tigers Are at Home will receive in the United States. The winner of France's Prix Medicis in 2008, this big, sprawling novel (in a translation by Mike...
View ArticleReal Writing, Real Life In Salter's 'All That Is'
"There comes a time," James Salter writes in the epigraph for his new novel, All That Is, "when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility...
View ArticleBook Review: 'Submergence'
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.
View ArticleHow To Put This 'Delicate'-ly ... Not Le Carre's Best Work
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...
View ArticleReader Advisory: 'Shining Girls' Is Gruesome But Gripping
Borrow from Stephen King a house with a wormhole that somehow allows for time travel, re-create the monstrous chilliness of scenes between a serial killer and his female victims in The Silence of the...
View ArticleBook Review: 'The Mehlis Report'
Alan Cheuse reviews a thriller The Mehlis Report a novel by Rabee Jaber that was recently translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid.
View ArticleBook Review: 'Skinner'
Transcript ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST: From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.AUDIE CORNISH, HOST: And I'm Audie Cornish.Charlie Huston is a Los Angeles-based writer known for his...
View ArticleRhetoric Drowns Out The Thrills In Huston's 'Skinner'
Charlie Huston's 2010 novel, Sleepless, bowled me over. What a powerful combination of combustible plot and fiery language! At the center of that book, an insomnia plague spreads across Southern...
View ArticleBook Review: 'Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish'
Transcript MELISSA BLOCK, HOST: The writer and humorist David Rakoff died last year at the age of 47 of cancer. He left behind his final work: a brief novel in verse with the long title "Love,...
View ArticleBook Review: 'Return To Oakpine'
Transcript AUDIE CORNISH, HOST: From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Audie Cornish.ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST: And I'm Robert Siegel. Home, Robert Frost famously wrote, is the place where, when...
View ArticleStripe-Torn Tigers, Fake Nazis And Magic Cake In 'The Color Master'
Aimee Bender is no longer the whiz kid of the American short story. The Color Master is her fifth work of fiction, and along with the idiosyncratic George Saunders she now stands as one of the reigning...
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