Sail Into Summer With Novel Picks From Alan Cheuse
Head to the bookstore or pick up your Nook or Kindle or iPad, and prepare, if you will, to make some decisions about your summer reading life. My suggestions this year tend to be fine new fiction, the...
View ArticleBook Review: 'God Carlos'
Transcript AUDIE CORNISH, HOST: From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Audie Cornish.MELISSA BLOCK, HOST: And I'm Melissa Block. Now to the 16th Century and the Spanish port of Cadiz. It's...
View ArticleA Midcentury Romance, With 'Sunlight' And 'Shadow'
New York, New York, it's a wonderful town! And Mark Helprin's new near-epic novel makes it all the more marvelous. It's got great polarized motifs — war and peace, heroism and cowardice, crime and...
View ArticleBook 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 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 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 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 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 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 ArticleA Coming Of Age Story For The (Ice) Ages
Transcript MELISSA BLOCK, HOST: From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST: And I'm Robert Siegel. A new novel explores life on Earth tens of thousands of years...
View Article'Nasty Piece Of Work' Makes Spy-Turned-PI Work Well
Alan Cheuse reviews Robert Littell's newest novel of a CIA agent turned private investigator, A Nasty Piece of Work.
View ArticleWritten In Secret Behind The Iron Curtain, 'Corpse' Is Revived
Transcript ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST: The fiction work of Soviet era writer Zigizmund Krzhizhanovsky never saw the light of day in his own time. He was known mostly as a theater, music and literally critic,...
View ArticleMcMurtry Takes Aim At A Legend In 'Last Kind Words Saloon'
In a prefatory note to The Last Kind Words Saloon, his first novel in five years, Western writer supreme Larry McMurtry states that he wants to create a "ballad in prose." And he borrows a line from...
View ArticleBook Review: 'Angels Make Their Hope Here'
Transcript AUDIE CORNISH, HOST: From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDRED. I'm Audie Cornish.ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST: And I'm Robert Siegel. Now to 19th-century New Jersey and a new novel. It set among...
View ArticleMartin Amis''Zone Of Interest' Is An Electrically Powerful Holocaust Novel
When I picked up Martin Amis' new novel, The Zone of Interest, it felt as though I had touched a third rail, so powerful and electric is the experience of reading it.
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'Lila' Sets The Stage For Marilynn Robinson's Earlier Works
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Book Review: 'The Convert's Song' By Sebastian Rotella
Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.Transcript ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST: Sebastian Rotella's thrillers can seem very realistic. Maybe that has something to do with his day job. He's a...
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Book Review: 'The Sacrifice' By Joyce Carol Oates
Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.Transcript ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST: Joyce Carol Oates fictionalizes the case of a 1980s rape hoax in her new novel. In the real-life case, a young...
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Book Review: 'Sympathy For The Devil' By Michael Mewshaw
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View Article'The Jaguar's Children' Is Ripped From Heartbreaking Headlines
In an extraordinary feat of literary ventriloquism, the widely praised Canadian nonfiction writer John Vaillant has produced a novel that seems to have leapt from the headlines.
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