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