Bøger af Alan Cheuse

Contents Introduction Washington Irving (1783-1859) "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (1819) Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) "My Kinsman, Major Molineux" (1832) "Young Goodman Brown" (1835) Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839) "The Purloined Letter" (1844) "The Cask of Amontillado" (1846) Herman Melville (1819-1891) "Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street" (1853) "The Encantadas or Enchanted Isles" (1854) Herman Melville (1819-1891) "My Contraband" also called "The Brothers" (1863) Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) (1835-1910) "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" (1865) Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) "The First Christmas of New England" (1876) Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909) "A White Heron" (1886) Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?) "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" (1891) "The Devil's Dictionary" (1906) Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892) Kate Chopin (1850-1904) "The Story of an Hour" (1894) Stephen Crane (1871-1900) "A Mystery of Heroism" (1895) Henry James (1843-1916) "The Beast in the Jungle" (1903) Jack London (1876-1916) "To Build a Fire" (1902/1908) "Samuel" (1909) Willa Cather (1873-1947) "The Enchanted Bluff" (1909) Edith Wharton (1862-1937) "Bunner Sisters" (1916) Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) "Free" (1918)

Presents essays by leading short-story writers on their favorite American short stories and why they like them. It will send readers to the library or bookstore to read - or re-read - the stories selected.On the assumption that John Updike was correct when he asserted, in a 1978 letter to Joyce Carol Oates, that "e;Nobody can read like a writer,"e; Why I Like This Story presents brief essays by forty-eight leading American writers on their favorite American short stories, explaining why they like them. The essays, which are personal, not scholarly, not only tell us much about the story selected, they also tell us a good deal about the author of the essay, about what elements of fiction he or she values. Among the writers whose stories are discussed are such American masters as James, Melville, Hemingway, O'Connor, Fitzgerald, Porter, Carver, Wright, Updike, Bellow, Salinger,Malamud, and Welty; but the book also includes pieces on stories by canonical but lesser-known practitioners such as Andre Dubus, Ellen Glasgow, Kay Boyle, Delmore Schwartz, George Garrett, Elizabeth Tallent, William Goyen, Jerome Weidman, Peter Matthiessen, Grace Paley, William H. Gass, and Jamaica Kincaid, and relative newcomers such as Lorrie Moore, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Phil Klay, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Edward P. Jones. Why I Like This Story will send readers to the library or bookstore to read or re-read the stories selected. Among the contributors to the book are Julia Alvarez, Andrea Barrett, Richard Bausch, Ann Beattie, Andre Dubus, George Garrett, William H. Gass, Julia Glass, Doris Grumbach, Jane Hamilton, Jill McCorkle, Alice McDermott, Clarence Major, Howard Norman, Annie Proulx, Joan Silber, Elizabeth Spencer, and Mako Yoshikawa. Editor Jackson R. Bryer is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Maryland.

Originally published as: The Grandmother's Club. Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, c1986.

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.

The very best short stories and novellas from National Public Radio's Alan Cheuse are brought together in a quintessential collection. Countless listeners depend on the book reviews from Cheuse, America's "e;voice of books,"e; and many of those listeners also follow his own critically acclaimed fiction and nonfiction. The title story--a flash fiction piece that acts as both prologue and an intriguing look at a writer's inspiration--takes us through a child's eyes into a fantastic land, one that informs, shapes, and travels along with the other stories in this stunning collection. These stories deal with life, death, love, family, work, and a deep exploration of the soul.

Finely-honed portraits of hope and change, these two novellas are linked so skillfully that they achieve the intensity of a single novel in which some characters succeed and others fail on separate but equally compelling quests. In "The Fires," Gina Morgan makes a pilgrimage to Uzbekistan to carry out her husband's final wish--to be cremated--only to find herself entirely at sea in the strange new reality of the former Soviet republic, while in "The Exorcism," Tom Swanson begins to make sense of his life when he retrieves his angry daughter from her exclusive New England college after her expulsion for setting fire to a grand piano.