Daniel Alarcón

The 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.

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 Alarcon is an extraordinary new voice in literary fiction, one you will not soon forget.

Literary advice from over fifty writers from more than twenty-five countries.

"La vida de Nelson no va cómo esperaba. La mujer que ama está con otro hombre, sus deseos de emigrar se han visto frustrados y su carrera como actor no acaba de despegar. Hasta que es elegido para actuar en El presidente idiota, la legendaria obra de Henry Núñez, líder de la compañía de teatro Diciembre, que se reúne quince años después de su disolución. La gira lleva a Nelson a paisajes que jamás ha visto, donde aún se observan las cicatrices de la guerra civil. Con cada representación, Nelson se involucra más y más en la vida de sus compañeros, hasta que un suceso enterrado durante años emerge y cambia el destino de Nelson para siempre. El narrador, un joven obsesionado con Nelson, va desvelando su historia. Escrita en una prosa vívida y afilada, ésta es una lectura compulsiva sobre la amistad, el amor y la pérdida, a la vez que una profunda meditación acerca de la identidad y las fatales consecuencias que la más pequeña de las decisiones puede tener en nuestras vidas."--Cover page 4.

A collection of new Latin American short fiction.

"A gorgeously rendered graphic novel of Daniel Alarcon's story City of Clowns. Oscar "Chino" Uribe is a young Peruvian journalist for a local tabloid paper. After the recent death of his philandering father, he must confront the idea of his father's other family, and how much of his own identity has been shaped by his father's murky morals. At the same time, he begins to chronicle the life of street clowns, sad characters who populate the violent and corrupt city streets of Lima, and is drawn into their haunting, fantastical world. This remarkably affecting story by Daniel Alarcon was included in his acclaimed first book, War by Candlelight, and now, in collaboration with artist Sheila Alvarado, it takes on a new, thrilling form. This graphic novel, with its short punches of action and images, its stark contrasts between light and dark, truth and fiction, perfectly corresponds to the tone of Chino's story. With the city of Lima as a character, and the bold visual language from the story, City of Clowns is moving, menacing, and brilliantly vivid"--