num_pages: 189
description: “[Alarcón’s] tales, set largely in the hardscrabble world of Lima, 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.”  —  Washington Post Book WorldIn this exquisite story collection, Daniel Alarcón moves from Third World urban centers to the fault lines that divide nations and people to illuminate wars, both national and internal, waged in jungles, across the borders, in the streets of Lima, and in the intimacy of New York apartments. He tells of lives at the margins: 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 of a world in flux from an extraordinary new voice in literary fiction, one you will not soon forget.
language: English
title: War by Candlelight
titlecomplete: War by Candlelight
genres: Collections, Short Stories, Latin American, The Americas, War, Read For School, Literature, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Fiction
ratings_count: 887
awards: awardedAt: 1136102400000
name: Dayton Literary Peace Prize
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 1136102400000
name: PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel
publisher: Harper Perennial