War by Candlelight

Daniel Alarcon's extraordinary collection takes the reader from Third World urban centres to the fault lines that divide nations and people. In these stories an unrepentant terrorist remembers where it all began; a would-be emigrant contemplates the ramifications of leaving and never coming back; a reporter turns in his pad and pencil for the inglorious costume of a street clown. In Alarcon's haunting landscape, wars both national and internal are waged in jungles, across borders, in the streets of Lima, and in the intimacy of New York apartments. These are the stories of those who live at the margins of the not-quite-globalised world - the people who never feel at home in the cities in which they were born.

Literature & Fiction

ALARCÓN, Daniel

Genre Fiction

Harper-perennial

Lost City Radio

Contemporary

4th Estate

At Night We Walk in Circles

Fourth Estate

FINALIST FOR THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FOR FICTION
LONGLISTED FOR THE DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE
A breathtaking, suspenseful search for the truth of one man’s spectacular downfall, from Daniel Alarcón, one of the New Yorker’s 20 best writers under 40.
Nelson’s life is not turning out the way he hoped. His girlfriend is sleeping with another man, his brother has left their South American country and moved to the United States, leaving Nelson to care for their widowed mother, and his acting career can’t seem to get off the ground. That is, until he lands a starring role in a touring revival of The Idiot President, a legendary play by Nelson’s hero, Henry Nunez, leader of the storied guerrilla theatre troupe Diciembre. And that’s when the real trouble begins.
The tour takes Nelson out of the shelter of the city and across a landscape he’s never seen, which still bears the scars of the civil war. With each performance, Nelson grows closer to his fellow actors, becoming hopelessly entangled in their complicated lives, until, during one memorable performance, a long-buried betrayal surfaces to force the troupe into chaos.
Nelson’s fate is slowly revealed through the investigation of the narrator, a young man obsessed with Nelson’s story―and perhaps closer to it than he lets on. In sharp, vivid, and beautiful prose, Alarcón delivers a compulsively readable narrative and a provocative meditation on fate, identity, and the large consequences that can result from even our smallest choices.

Literary

War by Candlelight: Stories

Something is happening around the globe: mass movements of peoples, dislocations of language and culture in the wake of war and economic crises -- simply put, our world is changing.
In this exquisite collection, Daniel Alarcón takes the reader from Third World urban centers to the fault lines that divide nations and people. Wars, both national and internal, are waged in jungles, across borders, in the streets of Lima, in the intimacy of New York apartments. These are lives at the margins of the globalized and not-yet-globalized worlds, the stories of those who shuttle between them and never quite feel at home in the cities where they were born: an unrepentant terrorist remembers where it all began, a would-be emigrant contemplates the ramifications of leaving and never coming back, a reporter turns in his pad and pencil for the inglorious costume of a street clown.
War by Candlelight is a devastating portrait ofa world in flux, and Daniel Alarcón is an extraordinary new voice in literary fiction, one you will not soon forget.

United States

Harper

A powerful and searing novel of three lives fractured by a civil war
For ten years, Norma has been the voice of consolation for a people broken by violence. She hosts Lost City Radio, the most popular program in their nameless South American country, gripped in the aftermath of war. Every week, the Indians in the mountains and the poor from the barrios listen as she reads the names of those who have gone missing, those whom the furiously expanding city has swallowed. Loved ones are reunited and the lost are found. Each week, she returns to the airwaves while hiding her own personal loss: her husband disappeared at the end of the war.
But the life she has become accustomed to is forever changed when a young boy arrives from the jungle and provides a clue to the fate of her long-missing husband.
Stunning, timely, and absolutely mesmerizing, Lost City Radio probes the deepest questions of war and its meaning: from its devastating impact on a society transformed by violence to the emotional scarring each participant, observer, and survivor carries for years after. This tender debut marks Alarcón's emergence as a major new voice in American fiction.

Something is happening. Wars, both national and internal, are being waged in jungles, across borders, in the streets of Lima, in the intimacy of New York apartments. War by Candlelight is an exquisite collection of stories that carry the reader from Third World urban centers to the fault lines that divide nations and people - a devastating portrait of a world in flux - and Daniel Alarcón is an extraordinary new voice in literary fiction, one you will not soon forget.

For ten years, Norma has been the on-air voice of consolation and hope for the Indians in the mountains and the poor from the barrios—a people broken by war's violence. As the host of Lost City Radio, she reads the names of those who have disappeared—those whom the furiously expanding city has swallowed. Through her efforts lovers are reunited and the lost are found. But in the aftermath of the decadelong bloody civil conflict, her own life is about to forever change—thanks to the arrival of a young boy from the jungle who provides a cryptic clue to the fate of Norma's vanished husband.

En el mundo, algo extraño está sucediendo: hay movimientos masivos de gente, lenguas y culturas que crecen dislocadas entre guerras y economías en crisis. En pocas palabras, nuestro mundo está cambiando. En este asombroso libro de cuentos, Daniel Alarcón transporta al lector de los centros urbanos tercermundistas a las líneas fragmentadas que muchas veces dividen naciones y personas. Un terrorista sin remordimientos recuerda sus comienzos, un posible inmigrante contempla las consecuencias de irse y no volver jamás, un reportero cambia su lápiz y papel por el trágico disfraz de un payaso callejero. Son guerras tanto nacionales como internas, que se llevan a cabo en la selva, en las calles de Lima o en la intimidad de un apartamento neoyorquino. Son vidas que se viven al margen del mundo globalizado y sin globalizar, son las historias de quienes constantemente viajan entre mundos diferentes sin jamás sentirse del todo en casa. Guerra en la Penumbra ilumina las grietas con las que todos tropezamos en el mundo moderno. Daniel Alarcón es un talento excepcional, una voz difícil de olvidar una vez el libro llega a su extraordinario y devastador desenlace.

Guerra en la Penumbra: Cuentos (Spanish Edition)

Rayo

LONGLISTED for the 2017 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION An urgent, essential collection of stories about immigration, broken dreams, Los Angeles gang members, Latin American families, and other tales of high stakes journeys, from the award-winning author of War by Candlelight and At Night We Walk in Circles. Migration. Betrayal. Family secrets. Doomed love. Uncertain futures. In Daniel Alarcón’s hands, these are transformed into deeply human stories with high stakes. In "The Thousands," people are on the move and forging new paths; hope and heartbreak abound. A man deals with the fallout of his blind relatives' mysterious deaths and his father's mental breakdown and incarceration in "The Bridge." A gang member discovers a way to forgiveness and redemption through the haze of violence and trauma in “The Ballad of Rocky Rontal.” And in the tour de force novella, "The Auroras", a man severs himself from his old life and seeks to make a new one in a new city, only to find himself seduced and controlled by a powerful woman. Richly drawn, full of unforgettable characters, The King is Always Above the People reveals experiences both unsettling and unknown, and yet eerily familiar in this new world.

The King Is Always Above the People: Stories

Penguin Publishing Group

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Books by ALARCÓN, Daniel

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by ALARCÓN, Daniel. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

War by Candlelight

Lost City Radio

At Night We Walk in Circles

At Night We Walk in Circles

War by Candlelight: Stories

Lost City Radio

War by Candlelight: Stories

Lost City Radio

Guerra en la Penumbra: Cuentos (Spanish Edition)

The King Is Always Above the People: Stories