War by Candlelight

“The engaging stories . . . draw on Peru’s violent history, the plight of Lima’s poor and the hopes of immigrants in New York . . . finely crafted fiction.” —Chicago Tribune

Winner of the Whiting Writers’ Award

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 of a world in flux, and Daniel Alarcón is an extraordinary new voice in literary fiction, one you will not soon forget.

“[A] raw debut collection filled with dislocated, dutiful souls.” —Entertainment Weekly



“Precise, searing language and immediately embraceable characters . . . Alarcón’s skill with language and his eye for the beautiful tragedy of the human condition are on brilliant display in War by Candlelight.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Alarcón draws on the plight of Lima’s poor and the hopes of New York’s immigrants in this raw first collection.” —The New York Times Book Review