Lost and Old Rivers
by Alan Cheuse
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The ten stories and one long "story from memory" in Alan Cheuse's new collection represent a wide range of characters in settings as disparate as the American side of Niagara Falls; Lake Charles, Louisiana; Crete, Nebraska; and sixteenth-century Mexico City. Here are stories about damaged women whose scars, literal and figurative, bear testament to the loves they've lost; about contemporary men unnerved by the messes they've made of their lives; about disrupted families, separated by show more physical and psychological abysses. Cheuse's narratives display an edgy vitality underneath their surface gloss. In "The Mexican Maid," a recently divorced numbers-cruncher in Washington, D.C., drifting aimlessly on the singles scene, has to confront his demons when he finds his maid dying on his living room floor. In "Midnight Ride," an aspiring filmmaker listens to the ticking of her biological clock as she rides horseback beneath L.A.'s freeways and over the city's methane-producing garbage heaps. An extended reverie of life's pivotal moments, "On the Millstone River: A Story from Memory" brings together fragments from a life, loosely linked by bodies of water or liquid--oceans, rivers, the Dead Sea, snow, milk baths, the "Y" pool--and by bodies of women--foreign, married, divorced, old, young, wives, daughters, mothers. This piece is a powerful reflection on the mystery of time and experiences and their effects on human sensibility. show lessTags
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Alan Cheuse was born in Perth Amboy, New Jersey on January 23, 1940. He graduated from Rutgers University and returned to receive a doctorate in 1974 after traveling abroad. He taught creative writing and literature at George Mason University from 1987 until his death. He also led fiction workshops at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers in show more California. During his lifetime, he published 12 books and delivered thousands of commentaries on NPR. His books included The Bohemians: John Reed and His Friends Who Shook the World, The Light Possessed, To Catch Lightning, and Prayers for the Living. He spent more than 25 years with NPR, contributing book reviews, profiles, and commentary to All Things Considered. Beginning in 1981, he reviewed an estimated 1,600 books and provided annual recommendations of summer and Christmas reading, as well as commentary on notable writers. He was known for championing the work of younger writers and independent publishers. He died from injuries sustained in a car accident on July 31, 2015 at the age of 75. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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