Description - Listening to the Page 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. The first section, "Reading", contains essays and lectures Cheuse wrote from a comparative literature perspective and takes a daring view of the affinities between seemingly disparate works of art. He makes clear the distinctions between ancient and modern literature and differentiates among the contemporary literatures of various cultures, noting especially his early interest in Latin American literature.
Next, "Rereading" includes 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. Also included in this section are essays about landscape in "All the Pretty Horses", the career of James Agee, and thoughts on the life and work of Robert Penn Warren. Then comes "Writing" - an activity Cheuse asserts to be the natural outcome of reading. Here he writes about such matters as what makes a good short story (citing examples from Amy Hempel and Mary Robison), how we think about contemporary writers and the process of authorship. The collection engages with subjects such as "Hamlet in Haiti", Mario Vargas Llosa and naturalism, and the situation of the reviewer.
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