The King Is Always Above the People
$17.00
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| Trade Discount | 5 + | 25% |
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Description
LONGLISTED for the 2017 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION
An urgent, essential collection of stories about immigration, broken dreams, Los Angeles gang members, Latin American families, and other tales of high stakes journeys, from the MacArthur “genius” and award-winning author of War by Candlelight and At Night We Walk in Circles.
Migration. Betrayal. Family secrets. Doomed love. Uncertain futures. In Daniel Alarcón’s hands, these are transformed into deeply human stories with high stakes. In “The Thousands,” people are on the move and forging new paths; hope and heartbreak abound. A man deals with the fallout of his blind relatives’ mysterious deaths and his father’s mental breakdown and incarceration in “The Bridge.” A gang member discovers a way to forgiveness and redemption through the haze of violence and trauma in “The Ballad of Rocky Rontal.” And in the tour de force novella, “The Auroras”, a man severs himself from his old life and seeks to make a new one in a new city, only to find himself seduced and controlled by a powerful woman. Richly drawn, full of unforgettable characters, The King is Always Above the People reveals experiences both unsettling and unknown, and yet eerily familiar in this new world.”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 Daniel Alarcón is the author of the collection The King Is Always Above the People, longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction, the novel At Night We Walk in Circles, which was a finalist for the 2014 PEN-Faulkner Award, as well as the story collection War by Candlelight and the novel Lost City Radio. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Granta, n+1, and Harpers, and he was named one of the New Yorker‘s “20 under 40” and a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship. He is Executive Producer of Radio Ambulante, and teaches at the Columbia University School of Journalism in New York.
The Thousands
There was no moon that first night, and we spent it as we spent our days: your fathers and your mothers have always worked with their hands. We came in trucks, and cleared the land of rock and debris, working in the pale yellow glow of the headlights, deciding by touch and smell and taste that the land was good. We would raise our children here. Make a life here. Understand that not so long ago, this was nowhere. The land had no owner, and it had not yet been named. That first night, the darkness that surrounded us seemed infinite, and it would be false to say we were not afraid. Some had tried this before and failed—in other districts, on other fallow land. Some of us sang to stay awake. Others prayed for strength. It was a race, and we all knew it. The law was very clear: while these sorts of things were not technically legal, the government was not allowed to bulldoze homes.
We had until morning to build them.
The hours passed, and by dawn, the progress was undeniable, and with a little imagination one could see the bare outlines of the place this would become. There were tents made of tarps and sticks. There were mats of woven reeds topped with sewn-together rice sacks, and sheets of pressboard leaning against the scavenged hoods of old cars. Everything the city discarded we’d been saving for months in preparation for this first night. And we worked and we worked, and for good measure spent the last hours of that long night drawing roads on the earth, just lines of chalk then, but think of it, just think . . . We could see them—the avenues they would be—even if no one else could. By morning, it was all there, this ramshackle collection of odds and ends, and we couldn’t help but feel pride. When we finally stopped to rest, we realized we were cold, and on the soft slope of the hill, dozens of small fires were built, and we warmed ourselves, each taking comfort in it, in our numbers, in this land we had chosen. The morning dawned pale, the sky scoured clean and cloudless. “It’s pretty,” we said, and yes, the mountains were beautiful that morning.
They still are. The government arrived before noon and didn’t know what to do. The bulldozers came, and we stood arm in arm, encircling what we had built, and did not move. “These are our homes,” we said, and the government scratched its febrile head. It had never seen houses like ours-our constructions of wire and aluminum, of quilts and driftwood, of plastic tarps and rubber tires. It came down off its machines to inspect these works of art. We showed the government the places we’d made, and eventually it left. “You can have this land,” it said. “We don’t want it anyway.”
The newspapers wondered where the thousands had come from. How we had done it. And the radio asked as well, and the television sent cameras, and little by little we told our story. But not all of it. We saved much for ourselves, like the words of the songs we sang, or the content of our prayers. One day, the government decided to count us, but it didn’t take long before someone decided the task was impossible, and so new maps were drawn, and on the empty space that had existed on the northeastern edge of the city, the cartographers now wrote The Thousands. And we liked the name because numbers are all we ever had.
Of course, we are many more than that now.
US
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| Dimensions | 0.6700 × 5.2000 × 7.9100 in |
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| Subjects | realistic fiction books, national, refugees, short story anthology, FIC056000, short fiction, migration, fiction books, books fiction, literary fiction, long story short, short story collections, migrants, short story collection, latin american literature, literary short stories, contemporary american short stories, border crossing, short stories, immigration, book, abraham lincoln, fiction, national book award, literary, FIC019000, novels, Literature, short story, collection, Immigrants, latino, Peru, family life, immigrant, award |
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