The King Is Always Above the People

Starred review from August 7, 2017
Alarcón (At Night We Walk In Circles) delivers a superb collection of 10 stories about wanderers, lovers, and fractured families. The fiery “The Ballad of Rocky Rontal” fictionalizes the true story of a violent gang member’s tenuous emotional journey toward forgiveness, while “The Provincials” follows the voyage of a father and son to the father’s hometown to address the postmortem details of an estranged relative. Bereavement also drives “The Bridge,” which places Alarcón’s protagonist, named executor of the estate of his recently deceased uncle and aunt, in the center of a mystery, sifting through family stories and conflicting claims to find the truth behind the couple’s deaths. In the powerful “The Auroras,” a man fleeing from his wife and academic life falls for a married woman and slowly yields to her power, and “República and Grau” pairs a child with a blind beggar who hopes to scam locals for loose change. 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.

August 15, 2017
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 Alarcon'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 Alarcon is deliberately vague about how much he is (or can be) rehabilitated. Similarly, "Republica 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 Alarcon'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.

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September 1, 2017
Dynamic novelist and journalist Alarcon (City of Clowns, 2015) delivers a collection of loosely affiliated short stories, each buzzing and alive with recurrent figures and neighborhoods, like the young man who ventures into the city from his small provincial town, the mourning extended family that surfaces at a wake, and the busy denizens of sprawling urban slums introduced in the first story, The Thousands. Several stories occupy this unspecified but recognizable third world outside the U.S. but adjacent to it. The Bridge recounts the accidental deaths of a blind couple, an uncle and aunt who bequeath their dusty, darkened apartment to an unassuming relative. Other stories revel in joyous departure from any and all expectations. Abraham Lincoln Has Been Shot is an an oddball love story about the assassinated president that takes place in Chicago's Wicker Park neighborhood, apparently outside any established time. The brief, hilarious Extinct Anatomies recounts an awkwardly erotic dentistry appointment. Alarcon's gift for generating real, tangible characters propels readers through his recognizable yet half-real worlds.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

May 15, 2017

Alarcon's novels include the multi-best-booked, multi-award-nominated Lost City Radio and the PEN Faulkner finalist At Night We Walk in Circles, but his reputation was already flaring owing to his first book, the story collection War by Candlelight. So it's good news that he's returning to the short form with these stories of failed love, family sorrow, and tricky leave-takings, as in "The Auroras," whose protagonist abandons his old life but can't abandon old habits.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2017

As in Alarcon'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. Alarcon 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," Hernan leaves an abusive relationship only to end up in an even worse one. The master-servant relationship in "Republica 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, Alarcon 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

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.