Alan Cheuse

Veteran California science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson grounds his new novel squarely in a recognizable convention: the generation ship. In this case, it's a 26th century starship sent from Earth to find a home in some distant galaxy, as generations live and die onboard during the long journey.

"We've been ...

The dedication of Don Winslow's novel The Cartel is nearly two pages long: a list of journalists who were either murdered or "disappeared" in Mexico between 2004 and 2012 — the period covered in this hugely hypnotic new thriller.

That's only a small number of victims compared to the total ...

Only last year, New Jersey writer Norman Lock brought out The Boy in His Winter, his time-travel version of Huck and Jim's passage along a great American river, and the river of time. In his new novel, American Meteor, Lock demonstrates that he doesn't have to lean on other people's ...

The Mazie of Jami Attenberg's new novel is Mazie Phillips Gordon — an actual New Yorker. Though born in Boston just at the end of the 19th century, she moved to New York City at the age of 10 to live with her sister Rosie. An attractive girl with a ...

NPR's Alan Cheuse reviews Paul Lynch's second novel, The Black Snow.

You may have read about an imaginary Southern piece of turf where the past presses on the present with such force that characters find themselves transformed with the pressure of it, where the landscape comes alive, where human beings seem sometimes like gods and sometimes like devils, and the language ...

Former Dublin newsman Paul Lynch made his debut as a novelist a few years ago with a book called Red Sky in Morning, set in mid-19th century County Donegal, where a rage-driven farmer has committed a murder with devastating results. The Black Snow, Lynch's second novel, returns us to Donegal, ...

NPR's Alan Cheuse reviews the novel, The New World, by Chris Adrian and Eli Horowitz.

When Edna O'Brien's first novel, The Country Girls, was published in 1960, her family and neighbors in the small Irish village where she was born tossed copies into a bonfire expressly set for that horrifying purpose. Nearly 60 years later, the country girl herself has long since moved to London, ...

NPR's Alan Cheuse reviews The Language of Paradise by Barbara Klein Moss.

NPR's Alan Cheuse reviews author Rachel Kushner's collection of short stories, The Strange Case of Rachel K.

NPR's Alan Cheuse reviews Steven Millhauser's new short story collection, Voices in the Night.

NPR's Alan Cheuse reviews the new novel by crime writer Jo Nesbo, Blood On Snow.

Fatima Bhutto (niece of assassinated Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto) has written several volumes of nonfiction and poetry; her first novel is a delicate but tense political thriller.

Alan Cheuse reviews one of his all-time favorite authors, Nobel Prize-winning Mario Vargas Llosa. His new book is called The Discreet Hero, and it was translated by Edith Grossman.

The Discreet Hero is set in two Peruvian cities, the provincial desert town of Piura and the metropolis of Lima, and tells of two aging businessmen, each of whom we meet on the verge of life-changing situations.

A transportation company owner from Piura, Felicito Yanaque, has spent most of his ...

I recall with a certain fondness a summer evening long ago at the Bennington Summer Writing Workshops, when Montana resident Richard Ford opened a reading from the work of Montana writer William Kittredge by saying, "Well, it's Montana Night at the workshops, and it's just like Montana. Hours will go ...

Alan Cheuse reviews a new experimental novel by Tom McCarthy called Satin Island.

Alan Cheuse reviews Ross Ritchell's new novel, The Knife.

Alan Cheuse reviews The Evening Chorus by Helen Humphries.