Listening to the Page [Paperback]

Alan Cheuse (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0231122713 | ISBN-13: 978-0231122719 | Publication Date: November 15, 2002

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

NPR listeners know Cheuse as the friendly book commentator who's been a fixture on All Things Considered for two decades; he is also a well-received fiction writer (The Bohemians; The Grandmothers' Club). Over the years Cheuse has consumed untold thousands of books for work, research and pleasure; for this reason if no other it would be interesting to hear what he has to say about the mysterious alchemies of reading and writing. But in this first collection of criticism, Cheuse's "adventures" turn out to be fairly uninspired excursions. Nearly two-thirds of the essays have appeared in other venues, and little has been done to update them or give them a book's coherence. For example, in his opening section, he treats stylistic points in the work of neglected Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier, leaving unexplained what the connection to the surrounding essaysone on pictorial fiction, one on readingmight be. Cheuse's critical prose tends to be a curious hybrid of biography, plot summary and appreciation, occasionally held together by a thin conceptual framework (e.g., "historical truth" or "minimalism"). His essays shy away from a critical standpoint, tending instead to graze around various topics before arriving at a sort of impenetrable nonconclusion ("Writers make narratives that develop over time... all we can do is work with our language and the time it takes to tell it in..."). The best parts of the book are anecdotal, recounting Cheuse's personal journeys as a reader and as a struggling writer; these generously conceived moments will leave readers the more disappointed for what this volume could have been. (May

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

The learned, lively, and handsomely crafted essays in this collection revive some neglected authors as varied as the dazzling Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier, the magisterial Tom Wolfe (the elder), and the Russian memoirist Lidiya Ginsburg. Cheuse, a book reviewer for National Public Radio's All Things Considered, unabashedly prefers prose to poetry and finds instruction, impetus for moral growth, and consolation both in epoch-spanning novels and in poignant short stories in which language is sharply trimmed to expose transformative experience. His essays are instructive, his enthusiasm contagious, his views unobjectionable. However, since Cheuse rarely allows for a whiff of the high-octane and shocking strangeness that lends great works their staying power, he skims from frequently fierce books only the mellow, feel-good comforts that one associates with purring cats, decaffeinated tea, and Oprah in the afternoon. Recommended for larger public libraries. Ulrich Baer, New York Univ.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Columbia University Press (November 15, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0231122713
• ISBN-13: 978-0231122719
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,598,931 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

ALAN CHEUSE


"The Voice of Books on National Public Radio"--that's how novelist, essayist and story writer Alan Cheuse has been described. For over twenty-five years, Cheuse has been "reading for America" every week on NPR, and he's also been writing a number of books of his own, and teaching the art of narrative and literature at George Mason University for over twenty years.
He is the author of the novels The Bohemians, The Grandmothers' Club and The Light Possessed. His latest novel, To Catch the Lightning (winner of the 2009 Grub Street Prize for Fiction), follows the career of turn of the century photographer Edward S. Curtis and his quest to photograph the western tribes of North America. He is also the author of several collections of short fiction and a pair of novellas published under the title The Fires. He is the co-editor with Nicholas Delbanco of Talking Horse: Bernard Malamud on Life and Art, and co-author with Delbanco of Literature: Craft & Voice, a major newly published introduction to college literary study, and also the co-editor of Writers Workshop in a Book: The Squaw Valley Community of Writers on the Art of Fiction, and editor of Listening to Ourselves: Great American Short Fiction.
Cheuse's essays, short stories, and reviews have appeared in numerous places, such as The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, World Literature Today, The Antioch Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and other venues. His essay collection, Listening to the Page, appeared in 2001. His collected travel essays came out in June 2009 under the title A Trance After Breakfast.