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Lost and Old Rivers Stories by Alan Cheuse |
"A book of masterfully wrought stories that scold and upend and shake up the notions we have about ourselves."—Lee K. Abbott
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 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.
Praise for The Light Possessed (reissued in 1998 by SMU Press)ALAN CHEUSE is book commentator for NPR's "All Things Considered." Cheuse is the author of a memoir, Fall Out of Heaven; three novels, The Bohemians, The Grandmothers' Club (reissued by SMU Press in 1994), and The Light Possessed; and two story collections, Candace and The Tennessee Waltz (reissued by SMU Press in 1992). His stories and reviews appear in the New Yorker, Ploughshares, the Chicago Tribune, and other literary venues. He teaches in the writing program at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. He and his wife, Kristin O'Shee, a dancer and choreographer, make their home in Washington, D.C."From its vivid first scene, the novel draws a richly imagined American life."—Kit Reed, New York Times Book Review
"Lush, poetic language in an impressionistic, stream-of-consciousness style. Read it if you are curious about light, about landscape or about the evolution and establishment of myth."—Roxana Robinson, Washington Post
"It is as if Cheuse has sent light through the lives, the fact-of-the-lives of [Georgia] O'Keeffe and her associates. The book seems more like a life, or at least the organic residue of a life, than it does a book, or 'art'—which is, I suppose, the finest thing toward which art can aspire."—Rick Bass, from the new foreword
Lost and Old Rivers
ISBN 0-87074-432-1
$19.95
6x9. 208 pp.
Fiction.
Publication Date: October 1998.
Terms of order and other ways to order