#alan cheuse

Alan Stuart Cheuse was an American writer, editor, professor of literature, and radio commentator. A longtime NPR book commentator, he was also the author of fi...

Feeling “ugly lonely”: a short story by the late Alan Cheuse, “The Burden.” | Literary Hub

In search of the darkest cult in American history: Laura Elizabeth Woollett on Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple. | Literary Hub

Yahdon Israel talks to fashion designer Charles Harbison on the books that influence him. | Literary Hub

The shortlist for the Man Booker International Prize has been announced. | The Man Booker Prize

“It draws the obsessive and brooding. It is perhaps the most isolating of games.” John Jeremiah Sullivan on David Foster Wallace’s love of tennis. | The New Yorker

What is language meant to do? Lynn Steger Strong on Virginia Woolf, reader-based prose, and learning to be a writer. | Catapult

“It’s our job, as awake humans, not just as writers, to consider things. Ugly, uncomfortable things and beautiful, terrifying things.” Amelia Gray interviews Catherine Lacey. | The Tower

Jung Yun on cluelessness, forced narrative breaks, and almost becoming a Tiffany. | Los Angeles Review of Books

“I crept back and forth on all fours across the overpass of Styx.” Ken Chen on visiting his father in the underworld. | Harriet

“I met an oil man in Marfa and we talked about this a little bit, and he explained it was the family business. That’s all. Owning the earth, I guess.” Stephanie La Cava talks to Flavin Judd and Eileen Myles about the West Texas Trans-Pecos pipeline. | The Believer Logger

“As a writer I’m interested in the aftermath of things—the events that happen after someone has already decided. That is more complicated, and more interesting to me.” An interview with debut novelist Brit Bennett. | Jezebel

Alan Cheuse -- a novelist, teacher and longtime literary commentator for NPR -- has died at the age of 75. Alan spent more than 25 years with NPR, contributing book reviews, profiles and commentary to All Things Considered, and lending his voice to online pieces, as well. During that time, he penned five novels of his own — the most recent of which, Prayers for the Living, was published this year.

Team member Rose worked with Alan for the last three years. She writes:

Alan Cheuse had already been reviewing books at NPR for decades when I started editing, but he was never intimidating. Instead he was warm and welcoming. He treated young people with respect. He was generous with his time and he was kind to everyone. A real mensch, with wonderful, expansive taste in literature. I'll miss him every day.

And so will we. 

We leave you with this illustration (by Nishant Choksi) commissioned for Alan’s 2012 winter book round-up. It’s how we at NPR Books will remember him:

Alan Cheuse, Novelist And Longtime NPR Contributor, Dies At 75

Remembering Alan Cheuse, Our Longtime Literary Guide

"He always took so much pride in what others were doing."

Alan Cheuse, who had been invited by Bill Sloane to attend the 1959 conference as a waiter, provides a good example of the distance that was beginning to separate Ciardi from some of the younger people at Bread Loaf. Cheuse was a Rutgers undergraduate and had wanted to take a course with Ciardi in the spring 1959, but settled for a different course with Sloane when Ciardi took the semester off on an unpaid leave in order to travel the lucrative lecture circuit. David Bain described Cheuse as "a vaguely Bohemian kid" with a finely tuned social conscience. That summer, at a Bread Loaf party held in Middlebury College's nearby ski lodge, Cheuse became wild when, during a sing-along, the partygoers began singing "Oid Black Joe" in the presence of Ralph Ellison. There is no record of Ellison's reaction, but Cheuse wrote of himself that he "became incensed" and "leaped up and knocked over the huge trash bin full of beer cans, effectivtely ending the party."

John Ciardi: A Biography by Edward M. Cifelli