Prayers for the Living

Alan Cheuse has been reviewing books on All Things Considered since the 1980s. Formally trained as a literary scholar, Cheuse writes fiction and novels and publishes short stories. He is the author of five novels, five collections of short stories and novellas, and the memoir Fall Out of Heaven. Cheuse teaches writing at George Mason University near Washington, D.C., spends his summers in Santa Cruz, CA, and leads fiction workshops at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers.Tova Mirvis, author of the foreword, has published three novels, Visible City, The Outside World and The Ladies Auxiliary, which was a national bestseller. She has been a Scholar in Residence at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute at Brandeis University, and Visiting Scholar at The Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center. She lives in Newton, Massachusetts, with her family.

"It is a pleasure to recommend a novel this good and this wise." -- Sanford Pinsker, Hadassah Magazine "Prayers for the Living troubles notions of righteousness and forgiveness, madness, and fate, providing no easy answers while still leaving readers feeling edified. Cheuse's is a challenging and intelligent novel, replete with beauty and heartbreak, and perhaps even containing a measure of redemption." -- Michelle Anne Schingler, Foreword Reviews "Cheuse's complex approach to storytelling via conversations, letters, and prayers is so much bigger than a typical narrative, as is this provocative story." -- Denise Hoover, Booklist Online "If this morally complex saga of one man's rise and spectacular fall in late 20th century America is typical of the quality of the [new] publisher's titles, its future is promising." -- Harvey Freedenberg, Shelf Awareness "The tragic story...makes for an interesting, intense and unforgettable read." -- Caresa Alexander Randall, Deseret News Praise for Prayers for the Living: "[Prayers for the Living] deserves to live among the great novels of Jewish American experience. It is a book that bears the weight of something old, yet feels new and utterly alive at the same time." -- Tova Mirvis, author of The Ladies Auxiliary, The Outside World, and Visible City (from the foreword) "'I want the world,' shouts William Dubin, the biographer-protagonist of Bernard Malamud's Dubin's Lives, raging at a life that thinks he should survive without passions. Meet Dubin's kinsman Manny Bloch, the tormented, cursed hero of this fine novel by Alan Cheuse. At once tender and brutal, unsparing and wise, Prayers for the Living masterfully ventriloquizes not only the voices of Manny and the people he cherishes and destroys, but those of an entire America staring at itself in a cracked mirror." -- Boris Fishman, author of A Replacement Life "A tour de force of voice, character, and psychology from an American master at the height of his powers. Minnie Bloch's tale of her family's slow disintegration echoes Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! recast in New York and New Jersey, a search for understanding and meaning amidst the wreckage of a life gone off the rails in pursuit of the American dream." -- Christian Kiefer, author of The Animals "Cheuse enlarges the immigrant tale of aspiration and loss. His narrator, in a lyrically heightened dialect as bold and capacious as the voices of William Faulkner, propels the story toward its conclusion with a dire largeness of scope that deserves the word 'tragic.'" -- Robert Pinsky, author of Gulf Music From previous editions of Prayers for the Living, titled The Grandmothers Club: "Minnie's story overflows with compassion and a profound sadness. Told in a language that is earthy, lyrical and never false, it is as deep and powerful and lasting as her wisdom." -- Publishers Weekly "It is a haunting story...A reader comes away with a sense that he has read an epic of Jewish life in America and of the sometimes tragic conflict between blessedness and wealth." - Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times "It is this seeing, a grandmother's ability to thrust herself into her son's surroundings, to soak up his past and dream her way into his future, to hallucinate a life for him, that is both the virtue and the extraordinary sting of this book...[Alan Cheuse's] novel is a bitter, brilliant series of songs, heartless and tender, with a magical displacement of time and a language that rattles us and reminds us how close art and chaos really are." - Jerome Charyn, The New York Times "In Minnie Bloch, Alan Cheuse (author of Candace & Other Stories and The Bohemians) has created a character of stunning authenticity, one whose nuances render her both lifelike and endearing...It is Minnie's humaneness that emerges with aching clarity, and her abundant sympathy for all those who stumble into crucibles from which there is no escape." - Judy Bass, The Chicago Tribune "...a touching, engrossing novel filled with rich, funny, moving characters who inhabit a world we welcome entering, thanks to Cheuse's loving and vivid imagination." -- Susan Stamberg, NPR "What makes this novel unusual is the doting, yet perceptive, Minnie Bloch, the frame through which we view Manny's rise and fall. She surrounds Cheuse's contemporary themes with a delightfully old-fashioned sort of storytelling, as if her tales derived from the collective memory. And she attains to mythic proportions herself, becoming, by book's end, a kind of spiritual mother, viewing generation after generation of her ever fallible sons with a mixture of love and sadness...A remarkably rich and resonant novel." -- Independent Publisher "Alan Cheuse's conception of his subject is bold and original...and his treatment of the lives of his characters is so richly detailed and multifaceted that they become both realistically familiar and almost mythologically true. The novel, in fact, develops into an epic saga of genuinely tragic dimension. It is a fine, quite unforgettable book by an abundantly talented writer." -- John W. Aldridge, critic and scholar "[Prayers for the Living] is daring, wildly ambitious, highly original, and triumphantly successful." -- George Garrett