War by Candlelight
Subtitle: Stories (P.S.)
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Published: April 11, 2006
Language: eng
Number of pages: 224
ISBN-13: 9780060594800
First sentence: I was fourteen when the lagoon spilled again.
Description: Nine short stories about people who have been displaced by war or economic crises take readers from the jungles and the streets of Lima, Peru, to the sites of dangerous border crossings, and to intimate New York apartments. Something is happening around the globe: mass movements of peoples, dislocations of language and culture in the wake of war and economic crises. Our world is changing. In this exquisite collection, Daniel Alarcon 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 of a world in flux. Daniel Alarcon is an extraordinary new voice in literary fiction--one you will not soon forget.