Listening to the Page: Adventures in Reading and Writing

Alan Cheuse

Published by Columbia University Press 2002

Listening to the Page

Adventures in Reading and Writing

Alan Cheuse

https://doi.org/10.7312/cheu12270

Overview
Contents

About this book

The novelist, critic, and book commentator from National Public Radio's All Things Considered looks back at some of the thousands of books he has read, reviewed, and loved, reflecting on the authors and works that have influenced him in his own writing and then focusing his attention on the process of writing itself.

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.

Author / Editor information

Alan Cheuse is a fiction writer, a long-time critic, and the book commentator on National Public Radio's All Things Considered. He is the author of eight books including The Grandmothers'Club, The Light Possessed, The Tennessee Waltz and Other Stories, and the memoir Fall Out of Heaven. He has written for many national publications and has taught at the University of Virginia and the University of Michigan, among other places. He currently serves as a member of the writing program at George Mason University.

Reviews

Ulrich Baer:
Learned, lively, and handsomely crafted essays.

[An] incisive and vivifying essay collection.... Cheuse is wholly engaged and creative, stoking readers' hunger and helping them understand the bounty of their pursuit.

Jacob Molyneux:
Despite his several novels and story collections, Alan Cheuse remains best known as the book critic on the public radio show 'All Things Considered.' The essays collected in Listening to the Page are longer and deeper than his pithy radio reviews and reveal a commitment to reading as a passionate engagement with life.

Marvin J. LaHood:
This is a fascinating book—and why not? Cheuse has probably read as much as anyone ever.

Sven Birkerts:
Steady, but also passionate, boundlessly receptive, but willing to tender strong judgment, Alan Cheuse is the reader any writer would want. For the same reasons, he is a writer serious readers will feel instantly connected to. Listening to the Page is a generous and wise and quietly instructive book of essays.

Ulrich Baer, New York University:
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's] essays are instructive, his enthusiasm contagious, his views unobjectionable.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introduction: Getting Started; or, Two Thousand Books Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Part 1. Reading
1. Writing It Down for James: Some Thoughts on Reading Toward the Millennium Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	15
2. Books in Flames: A View of Latin American Literature Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	33
3. The Lost Books Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	46
4. Hamlet in Haiti: Style in Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	55
5. Traces of Light: The Paradoxes of Narrative Painting and Pictorial Fiction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	77
6. Truth as Fiction: Or, the Tail of the Monstrous Peacock Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	94
7. The Consolation of Art Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	107
Part 2. Rereading
8. You Can Read Wolfe Again Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	134119
9. Stories of Deep Delight Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	134
10. Of Steinbeck and Salinas Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	150
11. The Return of James Agee Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	159
12. Mario Vargas Llosa and Conversation in the Cathedral: The Question of Naturalism Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	176
13. Where Is She Going? Where Has She Been?: Elizabeth Tallent’s “No One’s a Mystery’’ and the Poetry of Female Initiation Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	184
14. A Wintry Saga Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	192
15. Bernard and Juliet: Romance and Desire in Malamud’s High Art Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	198
16. Fitzgerald’s Christmas Carol, or the Burden of “The Camel’s Back’’ Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	207
17. A Note on Landscape in All the Pretty Horses Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	215
18. Rereading Traven Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	220
Part 3. Writing
19. Confessions of an Ex-Minimalist Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	227
20. On the Contemporary Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	243
21. Of the Making of Books Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	254
22. Voices: A Conversation Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	272

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 256

eBook

Published: September 25, 2002
ISBN: 9780231504461