Alan Cheuse

Edward Curtis travels throughout North America in the late nineteenth century to photograph every Indian tribe on the continent but becomes personally involved with his subjects as he watches their way of life disappear.

A Novel of American Dreaming

To Catch the Lightning

An Autobiographical Journey

Fall Out of Heaven

Prayers for the Living is a novel both grand in its vision and loving in its familiarity. Presented in a series of conversations between grandmother Minnie Bloch and her companions, Alan Cheuse, National Public Radio commentator on All Things Considered, unfolds a layered family portrait of three generations of the Bloch family, whose members are collapsing under everyday burdens and brutal betrayals. Her son Manny is a renowned, almost legendary rabbi. Respected by his congregants and surrounded by family, no one suspects that he yearns for a life of greater personal glory, but when an oracular bird delivers what Manny believes to be a message from his deceased father, he abandons his congregation in pursuit of a life in business and his entire life spirals out of control. As Manny’s fortunes rise in the corporate realm, he falls deeper into an affair with a congregant, a Holocaust survivor, his wife sinks deeper into alcoholism and depression and his daughter, traumatized by a sexual scandal at college, makes Manny the target of a plot to shatter his newly-found empire. The devoted family matriarch, Minnie, observes and recounts the tragic downfall of her family, unable to save them from themselves.

A Novel

Prayers for the Living

Mrs. Bloch, gathering with her friends at the local soda fountain each day tells the story of her son, a former rabbi and now a successful businessman

The Grandmothers' Club

Lisa Alvarez

An anthology of essays and tutorials brings together the wisdom, insights, advice, and inspiration from the Squaw Valley Community of Writers workshops, seminars, and lectures, featuring contributions by Mark Childress, Diane Johnson, Anne Lamott, Michael Chabon, Robert Stone, Amy Tan, and other notable authors. Original.

The Squaw Valley Community of Writers on the Art of Fiction

Writer's Workshop in a Book

Caroline Marshall

Includes thirty-eight stories, by both established and unknown writers, that have appeared on the short story radio program

The Sound of Writing

The very best short stories and novellas from National Public Radio's Alan Cheuse are brought together in a quintessential collection. Countless listeners depend on the book reviews from Cheuse, America's "voice of books," and many of those listeners also follow his own critically acclaimed fiction and nonfiction. The title story—a flash fiction piece that acts as both prologue and an intriguing look at a writer's inspiration—takes us through a child's eyes into a fantastic land, one that informs, shapes, and travels along with the other stories in this stunning collection. These stories deal with life, death, love, family, work, and a deep exploration of the soul.

An Authentic Captain Marvel Ring and Other Stories

Lyrically told and impeccably researched, Song of Slaves in the Desert traces the story of Nathaniel Pereira, a young New Yorker who's called to revive his uncle's South Carolina plantation. Nathaniel is struck by the sobering reality of slavery as he becomes captivated by the young slave Liza. Liza's never known the meaning of freedom, and as Nathaniel plunges into the murky mysteries of slavery, she can see how he might change her life forever. A masterful writer, Cheuse traces the thread of slavery from sixteenth-century Timbuktu and grapples with the wild nature of love.

Song of Slaves in the Desert

When he sold his first short story to The New Yorker in 1979, Alan Cheuse was hardly new to the literary world. He had studied at Rutgers under John Ciardi, worked at the Breadloaf Writing Workshops with Robert Frost and Ralph Ellison, written hundreds of reviews for Kirkus Reviews, and taught alongside John Gardner and Bernard Malamud at Bennington College for nearly a decade. Soon after the New Yorker story appeared, Cheuse wrote a freelance magazine piece about a new, publicly funded broadcast network called National Public Radio, and a relationship of reviewer and radio was born. In Listening to the Page, Alan Cheuse takes a look back at some of the thousands of books he has read, reviewed, and loved, offering retrospective pieces on modern American literary figures such as Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, Bernard Malamud, and John Steinbeck, as well as contemporary writers like Elizabeth Tallent and Vassily Aksyonov. Other essays explore landscape in All the Pretty Horses, the career of James Agee, Mario Vargas Llosa and naturalism, and the life and work of Robert Penn Warren.

Adventures in Reading and Writing

Listening to the Page

Finely-honed portraits of hope and change, these two novellas are linked so skillfully that they achieve the intensity of a single novel in which some characters succeed and others fail on separate but equally compelling quests. In "The Fires," Gina Morgan makes a pilgrimage to Uzbekistan to carry out her husband's final wish—to be cremated—only to find herself entirely at sea in the strange new reality of the former Soviet republic, while in "The Exorcism," Tom Swanson begins to make sense of his life when he retrieves his angry daughter from her exclusive New England college after her expulsion for setting fire to a grand piano.

The Fires

Howard Norman

From acclaimed author Alan Cheuse comes a trio of provocative novellas. In the title piece, Paradise, or, Eat Your Face, we meet travel writer Susan Wheelis and follow her exotic journey to Bali, and into her own frustrated soul. Care centers on Rafe Santera, a recent stroke victim who was once a vibrant, intellectual romantic. Attended by one of his many female admirers, we find ourselves in the midst of an unusual and politically incorrect love story. Cheuse takes us into Santera's erotic past, set against the daily struggles of a harrowing decline. The third novella, When The Stars Threw Down Their Spears and Watered Heaven with Their Tears, follows author Paul Brunce as he grapples with art, life, and family. Publisher's Weekly has praised Cheuse's "impressive command of many voices" and, in this collection, he is once again in top form and in possession of a powerful range of literary gifts.

Alan Cheuse

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