A Trance After Breakfast: And Other Passages

by Alan Cheuse

Overview

A collection of lyrical travel writings from celebrated writer and NPR commentator Alan Cheuse.

Along with luggage and tickets, we always travel with that which it is impossible to leave behind: ourselves, our spirits, our souls. By definition the best travel writing carries us on a soul-journey, the sort of trip that dramatizes how the heart learns about its place in the world.

In A Trance After Breakfast, poetic wanderer and novelist (To Catch the Lightning) Alan Cheuse has crafted a collection that masterfully exceeds such standards. He lures the reader around the world, from Bali and New Zealand to Mexico and back home again to his native New Jersey, making the foreign familiar and the familiar slightly foreign.

Collected from such celebrated publications as Gourmet, the Antioch Review, and the San Diego Reader, the dispatches in A Trance After Breakfast will enchant, captivate, and transport readers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781402247699
Publisher:	Sourcebooks
Publication date:	06/01/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	363 KB

About the Author

Novelist, essayist, and story writer Alan Cheuse has been described as "The Voice of Books on NPR." He has written four novels, including the recent To Catch the Lightning, and a pair of novellas. He is also the editor of Seeing Ourselves: Great Early American Short Stories and co-editor of Writers' Workshop in a Book. He teaches writing at George Mason University.

Novelist, essayist, and story writer Alan Cheuse (Washington, D.C.) has been described as "The Voice of Books on NPR." The author of A Trance after Breakfast, he has also written three novels and a pair of novellas. He is the editor of Seeing Ourselves: Great Early American Short Stories and co-editor of Writers' Workshop in a Book. He teaches writing at George Mason University.

Editorial Reviews

Novelist, essayist, editor and NPR mainstay Cheuse (To Catch the Lightning, Listening to the Page) compiles a highly literate travelogue from material previously published in Gourmet, the Antioch Review and elsewhere. In "Reading the Archipelago," Cheuse's survey of Indonesia-centric literature is so compelling it will make readers want to pick up some Conrad and Melville. The clever "Thirty-five Passages Over Water" covers notable journeys, the parts that come before or after the destination, moving backward in time. "CODA: Two Oceans" evokes the Jersey native's Atlantic/Pacific memories. The title piece recounts Bali's atmosphere of spirituality, but isn't as strong as his reporting from the U.S.-Mexico border at San Ysidro: "the great crossing point, nexus of cultures, nexus of countries, nexus of vision, nexus of borderlands between first world and third"; he's just as piercing regarding the psychology of those who make the trip across. Though it starts slow, three Mexico narratives prove splendid enough to forgive; Cheuse's eclectic journeys shine a spotlight on one of the greatest rewards of travel, "to know... something quite valuable that had never occurred to us before."
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