"These stories explore immigration, family loyalty and redemption. Alarcón throws his characters into high-stakes situations to draw out humanity where it seems little hope is left." —The Washington Post
“Alarcón is an empathic observer of the isolated human, whether isolated by emigration or ambition, blindness or loneliness, poverty or war. His stories have a reporter's mix of kindness and detachment, and perhaps as a result, his endings land like a punch in the gut. . . .He's a brilliant stylist, and there are plenty of moments in this collection where he's happy to flex. . . Alarcón writes about them with a grayscale beauty that few writers can achieve, or try to. His purpose isn't to approve or condemn, or to liberate. He's writing to show us other people's lives, and in every case, it's a pleasure to be shown.” —NPR
"Showcases his talent as a master storyteller. In 10 vivid, captivating stories, Alarcón explores immigration, family relationships, secrets, betrayal, hope, love, heartbreak, forgiveness, and redemption." —Buzzfeed
"Smart, political and incredibly engaging... Alarcón introduces readers to countless unforgettable characters along the way.” —Nylon (25 Books to Read this Fall)
“Vividly realized characters encounter family secrets, uncertain futures, ill-fated love and redemption.” —Chicago Tribune
“Complicated stories, told with consummate skill.” —BBC
“Polished and poetic.” —Vanity Fair
"Elegant." — San Francisco Chronicle
“Longlisted for the National Book Award this year, his new collection, The King Is Always Above the People, delivers on every level, from the intricate to the inventive, from the subtle to the sublime… Alarcón’s first-person narrators…give the collection its velocity and vulnerability in the face of love, lust, fear and cruelty… In dazzling prose, then, The King Is Always Above the People mulls weighty philosophical questions, but through intimate personal dramas that Alarcón deftly teases out to surprise endings, a David Lynch-style menace and surrealism brewing beneath the surface of everyday lives. There’s daring and defiance in these stories, a beauty that will make your soul soar, as Alarcón ascends steadily to the top tier of American writers.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune
“Spellbinding... Alarcon has a true gift for packing details and significance into short scenes. . . Every portrait is so memorable and sharply written that it lingers in your mind and tests your ability to confront the intense predicaments we all find ourselves in at one point or another.” —Cup of Jo
“Alarcón employs a remarkable range of styles in the book…brilliant…Alarcón’s poetic prose gives his work a dreamlike quality.” —Newsday
“Dark and incisive.” —Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
“Alarcon is a truly impressive writer.” —Boston Globe
“A brilliant meditation on personality and place, character and circumstance, and the decisions small and big (within and beyond) one’s control that can shape a life. Alarcón moves from the personal to the collective, encompassing stories of migration, immigration, violence, loss, hope, love.” —goop
"Superb... Throughout the collection, Alarcón writes with a spellbinding voice and creates a striking cast of characters. Each narrative lands masterfully and memorably, showcasing Alarcón's immense talent." —Publishers Weekly (STARRED REVIEW)
“Dynamic novelist and journalist Alarcón delivers a collection of loosely affiliated short stories, each buzzing and alive…Alarcón’s gift for generating real, tangible characters propels readers through his recognizable yet half-real worlds.” —Booklist
“A smart and understated collection that puts some new twists on old-fashioned identity crises.” —Kirkus
Praise for Daniel Alarcón
"His tales build with all the power of a Flannery O'Connor story: a gentle enough start, an innocent setting, and before long the reader is adrift in a drama that defies the imagination—with characters that live long after the book is closed." —The Washington Post
"Daniel Alarcón is a storyteller whose wisdom outpaces his youth, and whose talent is already ablaze." —ZZ Packer
"Daniel Alarcón writes about subterfuge, lies, and the arbitrary recreation of history with a masterful clarity." —Ann Patchett
Praise for At Night We Walk in Circles
“Wise and engaging . . . [a] layered, gorgeously nuanced work.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Consistently compelling . . . Alarcón’s smoothly polished prose [is] flecked with wit and surprisingly epigraphic phrases . . . with lines that knock the wind out of you.”
—The Washington Post
“Outstanding . . . a work that creates a multilayered world and invites you to enter it.”
—Hector Tobar, Los Angeles Times
"Masterful... A profound meditation on how identity is less a fixed substance within us than an ever-shifting performance in reaction to a perceived audience." —Anthony Marra, San Francisco Chronicle
“Masterful . . . a sterling novel . . . brave, thoughtful and astute . . . elegant in its construction, it feels perfectly suited to bring Alarcón’s tremendous talent to a wider audience.”
—The Miami Herald
“Compelling . . . an intellectual puzzle.”
—The Boston Globe
10/15/2017
As in Alarcón's 2005 collection, War by Candlelight, different types of relationships unite the ten stories in this second collection. Variable in length as well as style, the pieces range from three to 58 pages, with four longer ones more sustained and better developed. Alarcón breaks up the going-home tale of "The Provincials" by accelerating part of the action with a short play. "The Bridge" juxtaposes the double whammy of a man dealing with an incarcerated, mentally unstable father and the sudden loss of his blind uncle. In "The Auroras," Hernán leaves an abusive relationship only to end up in an even worse one. The master-servant relationship in "República and Grau" re-creates the picaresque tradition in a modern, busy metropolitan intersection. Though some of these stories have already been published independently over the past decade, including translations into Spanish (not by the author), all share universal themes of love, death, acculturation, but above all, familial discord that transcends ethnicity. VERDICT Peruvian-born but Alabama-bred and presently on the journalism faculty at Columbia University, Alarcón was named one of The New Yorker's "20 under 40"; these stories enhance his reputation with their realistic writing style and highly believable characters. [See Prepub Alert, 4/24/17.]—Lawrence Olszewski, North Central State Coll., Mansfield, OH
2017-08-03
A clutch of well-turned stories filled with characters concerned with the limits of their personalities."The Ballad of Rocky Rontal," a brief, early story in Alarcón's (City of Clowns, 2015, etc.) second collection, turns on a question that recurs throughout the book: what circumstances make us who we are, and how much can we change? Rocky grows up in an abusive home and murders a man as an adult, but after 32 years in prison he returns to a "world that's disappointingly familiar," and Alarcón is deliberately vague about how much he is (or can be) rehabilitated. Similarly, "República and Grau" turns on a 10-year-old boy who's put to work by his father to help a blind man beg on the streets, playing with the question of how much looking like a beggar actually makes him one. And in the closing "The Auroras," a man takes a one-year leave from his university job and stumbles into a relationship with a married woman; after lying about being a doctor, a host of other questions rises up about what he can make himself into (a violent person, for one), culminating in a twist ending that shows how liberating your sense of self can be a kind of entrapment. The tone throughout the stories is flat and nonjudgmental, though sometimes you can sense a smirk in Alarcón's prose about the predicaments: in "The Bridge" a blind couple falls "steadily, lovingly, to [their] death[s]" off a bridge broken in an accident, and a man pretending to be his brother in "The Provincials" takes a detour into the format of a comic play. But the overall message is that we mess with our personalities at our peril. A smart and understated collection that puts some new twists on old-fashioned identity crises.
