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 voice of books, and many of those listeners also follow his own critically acclaimed fiction and non-fiction. 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.

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 "Nobody can read like a writer," 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.

"An impressive gathering of the late Malamud's essays, interviews, lectures and notes. . . . In addition to admirers of Malamud's fiction, this book should also be of considerable interest to aspiring writers, as Malamud is open and revealing about his own creative process, and consistently engaging in his often politicized and outspoken views on the artist's role in society".--PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

Throughout American history, short story writers have entertained us by creating brief narratives - short takes, we might call them - of the people and places that have become our national heritage. Alan Cheuse, the writer whose voice is familiar to all who listen to NPR, has put together a new variety of anthology, one that starts as a collection of wonderful literature but, by means of Cheuse's selection and commentary, becomes a social history of our nation. Organized chronologically, the anthology has been edited so that each story contributes to building a picture of America from the earliest stories in the 19th century all the way to World War I. The Greatest Early American Short Stories: People and Places that Came Before Us features stories by Washington Irving, Louisa May Alcott, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, and more.

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.

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.