Listening to the Page: Adventures in Reading and Writing

by Alan Cheuse

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.

305 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 24, 2001

About the author

American writer and critic.
For more than two decades, Alan Cheuse has served as NPRs voice of books. He is the author of three novels, including The Grandmothers Club and The Light Possessed, several collections of short stories, and a pair of novellas recently published in The Fires. He is also the editor of Seeing Ourselves: Great Early American Short Stories and co-editor of Writers Workshop in a Book. Stories and co-editor of Writers Workshop in a Book."
Forthcoming in March, 2015, the novel
Prayers for the Living...
Born in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, Cheuse grew up in a Jewish family, the son of a Russian immigrant father and a mother of Russian and Romanian descent

Reviews

[Terri R · Rating 3 out of 5]

I miss Alan Cheuse, who used to review books on NPR. I don’t have great patience for essays, but a couple of these were worth the slog. Almost made me want to read some the great classic Russian and American novelists and short story writers, or to read Cheuse’s own work. Maybe some day, but for now my to-read list is already longer than anyone’s lifetime.

[Susannah · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some interesting stuff. Author's condescending pessimism gets quite thick, though, & I had to skim a lot...

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book will make you rethink literature and love Cheuse. His candor about himself surprises. The depth of his reading enlightens.