A Cheney Sampler: Excerpts from Works by Glenn Alan Cheney
by Glenn Alan Cheney Paperback: $15
Glenn Alan Cheney is the author of more than 40 books and the translator of another dozen. His hundreds of articles, essays, op-ed pieces, and stories have appeared in innumerable newspapers and magazines.
This 600-page collection include excerpts from books on Brazil's Estrada Real and Quilombo dos Palmares, cats, bees, Mohandas Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, the Pilgrims, Chernobyl, nuns, atrocities in Amazonia, incarceration, death and burial, the ends of the world.
The book includes essays that look into hiccups, couches, Covid, elections, wealth, statues, nuclear power, being buried alive, pawnshops, corruption, materialism, lawns, alarm clocks, lies, dogs, chocolate, a hermitic pacifist, an old man and his Model T.
Chapters from Cheney's novels mix humor into dark themes—a lonely teenager, life in a town of crazy people, a family in trouble in Amazonia, a drifter bereft of love. His poems punch with terseness and tangible details. The book also includes whole short stories, tales of a frog farm in Brazil, the midlife crisis of a Dodge, a baby named Moses, a barber who couldn't cut hair, a young writer grappling with a world of signs and symbols.
In A Cheney Sampler, the reader can dip into a trove of Cheney's work. It includes excerpted chapters, brief essays, a few stories, a smattering of poems, and a taste of translations.
Cheney's world is quite unlike yours or any other. It's worth a look.