“I am an American Writer”: An Interview with Daniel

Alarcón
Marisel Moreno, Thomas F. Anderson

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S., Volume 39, Number 4, Winter

2014, pp. 186-206 (Article)

Published by Oxford University Press

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 “I am an American Writer”: An Interview
with Daniel Alarcón
Marisel Moreno and Thomas F. Anderson
University of Notre Dame

During his visit to the University of Notre Dame in October 2011, Daniel Alarcón
remarked, “If I’m writing about Latin America, then I’m writing about the United
States.” This seemingly straightforward statement offers a unique window into
the literary and cultural production of this young American author. Alarcón orig-
inally broke into the US literary landscape in the mid-2000s, but today his impact
extends to his native Peru, Latin America, and beyond. Translated works in more
than ten languages have certainly increased his visibility worldwide, but it is
perhaps his latest venture—Radio Ambulante—that has allowed him to reach
many other audiences across the globe. Radio Ambulante, an Internet
“Spanish-language radio program showcasing compelling human stories from
around Latin America and the United States” (“Project”), constitutes another
manifestation of Alarcón’s artistic talent that has sought to highlight the connec-
tions between all of the Americas—North, Central, and South. Because it has
become “increasingly difficult to tell where Latin America begins and where
North America ends” (Alarcón “Daniel”), Alarcón’s literary and radio produc-
tions work in tandem to minimize the distances created across borders and
emphasize stories linking humanity.
Yet in underscoring those shared stories—such as migration—Alarcón does
not turn a blind eye to the specific circumstances and forces shaping those
experiences. His narratives expose the links between poverty, war, violence,
and revolution in Latin America, including its history of neocolonialism and
authoritarian regimes. Migration, violence, and poverty are central concerns in
his work and cannot be understood independently of one another. His writing
about migration from the rural Peruvian highlands to urban Lima in “City of
Clowns” (2005) confronts the reader with not only the hopelessness children face
living in an abandoned mining town, but also the violence and dangers that char-
acterize life in shantytowns that emerged in the outskirts of the city as a result of
massive migration flows. In “The Idiot President” (2008), Alarcón writes about a
theater troupe performing in another isolated Andean mining town, reminding
readers of the impact of decades of civil war and the effects of neocolonialism
through class disparities among American engineers and the people in the town.
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 “I a m a n A m e r i c a n W r i t e r ”

While the setting in many of his stories is Peru—or at least an unspecified Latin
American country reminiscent of Peru—Alarcón’s narratives invite his readers to
connect and think about those realities reflected in other global settings. Above
all, the stories continually remind us that we are all connected. As he expressed
in an interview, “The future is all about impurities, mestizaje, and so if I write
about the neighborhoods of Lima, created through internal migration—because
these are global processes at work—I am by implication also writing about New
York, San Jose, Atlanta, Cleveland, Madrid, London . . .” (“Daniel”).1
By becoming a prominent voice and cultural actor in the US and Peru, Alarcón
has been successful in bridging the US and Latin American literary landscapes.
Making one’s presence felt in both places is by no means an easy feat among
US Latina/o authors, who commonly remain outside the literary and cultural cir-
cles of their countries of origin. Alarcón’s influence in Peru speaks to the potential
links that can be fostered between the US and Latin America and serves as a
model for building transcontinental dialogue.
Born in Lima, Peru, but raised in Birmingham, Alabama, Alarcón grew up as a
middle-class American with close family ties in Peru. After graduating with an
anthropology degree from Columbia University, he won a Fulbright Fellowship,
which allowed him to spend a year in Lima teaching photography to children
and adolescents in the shantytown of San Juan de Lurigancho. His stories began
to appear in the early 2000s in publications such as Harper’s, The New Yorker,
McSweeney’s, n+1, and El Paı́s, and he was recognized in Best American Non-
Required Reading 2004 and 2005. His first collection of stories, War by
Candlelight (2005), was a finalist for the 2005 PEN/Hemingway Award, and his
novel, Lost City Radio (2007), was named Best Novel of the Year by the
Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle and won the 2009
International Literature Prize in Berlin. In the relatively short amount of time since
Alarcón emerged as a writer, he has managed to carve a solid reputation both in
the US, where he was named one of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40,” and in his
home country of Peru, where he is associate director of the prestigious literary
magazine Etiqueta Negra. His latest book, At Night We Walk in Circles (2013),
was a finalist for the 2014 PEN/Faulkner Foundation Award.
In addition to writing fiction, Alarcón has published several journalism pieces,
including “All Politics Is Local: Election Night in Peru’s Largest Prison” (2012),
nominated for the National Magazine Award in Reporting. He is currently a vis-
iting scholar in the investigative reporting program at the University of California,
Berkeley. In an effort to combine his interest in fiction and journalism, Alarcón
founded Radio Ambulante in conjunction with his wife, Carolina Guerrero, and
colleagues, Martina Castro and Annie Correal. Since its foundation, Radio
Ambulante has been gaining widespread popularity and was recently featured
on the Democracy Now! radio program.2 The show’s success has been partly
due to its accessibility via the Internet as well as the partnerships it has
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established with radio stations and programs across the US, Latin America, and
Europe, including BBC Mundo and PRI’s The World. Daniel Alarcón has been
named Assistant Professor of Broadcast Journalism and will begin teaching in
Spring 2015 at Columbia University’s Journalism School. He lives in San
Francisco with his wife and family.
Thomas F. Anderson and I interviewed Alarcón during his visit to the
University of Notre Dame, where he read from his then work-in-progress, At
Night We Walk in Circles, to an audience of more than three hundred people.3
Over tea and coffee at our home, we spoke with the author on the morning of
3 October 2011 about the complexities of being a Peruvian American writer;
his views on US Latina/o literature; the reception of his work; his experiences
teaching photography in impoverished San Juan de Lurigancho as a Fulbright
Scholar; Latin American literature; Peruvian cinema; and his two most recent
projects, Radio Ambulante and At Night We Walk in Circles.
Marisel Moreno: I would like to begin by asking about the label norteamerin-
caico,4 which you have used to describe yourself. Can you tell us about this term?
What does it mean to you?
Daniel Alarcón: First, I should say that I did not come up with the term. It was
one of my nicknames when I was living and working in San Juan de Lurigancho.
The other one was el grengo, making fun of the way that people from the Andes
pronounce the i when they come to Lima. They often confuse the e for the i, so it
was like gringo5 but pronounced Andean, “grengo.” What was funny was that
when I was first working at San Juan de Lurigancho, a lot of my students were
second generation or one-and-a-half generation limeños [from Lima]. They were
limeños, but their parents or grandparents were from the Andes, so they were very
aware of the different ways of speaking Spanish and the different intonations and
how those accents marked you. And they often joked that I spoke Spanish like an
andino [Andean]. That is why they came up with the terms norteamerincaico and
grengo. The other nickname was cabeza de brocoli [broccoli head], but that has
more to do with my looks than anything else. [Laughter] I do think it’s one of
those interesting and funny sobrenombres [nicknames]. I like it and feel flattered
by it.
Thomas F. Anderson: The people in San Juan de Lurigancho, how did they react
to your presence? They must have had a lot of questions for you about what it’s
like being a Peruvian American coming back to Peru.
DA: Yes, they did have a lot of questions. Something interesting is the fact that I
was an “ordinary” American living in an area where there were a lot of Mormons,
so they quickly established that I was not a Mormon. In my case, the fact of being
an outsider, of being peruano [Peruvian] but not having lived in Peru and not
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having been raised in Lima—and particularly not being raised with the classism
that exists in Lima—made it much easier for me to participate in daily life, I
think. If I had been a regular limeño raised in Lima, in that context I might have
been thought of as a pituco, an upper-class limeño. They would have thought,
“Why is he here?” I would have been looked at with much more distrust, whereas
in my case I was looked at with lots of curiosity, a lot of benevolence. There were a
lot of people taking me in and sort of wanting to show me their things, protect,
and look after me. I think it helped that I was young and played a lot of sports like
basketball, so I was able to participate in the normal things that people do in that
area, that young men do.
Let me tell you a really fascinating anecdote about class and race in Lima.
There was something that I noticed when I walked around; people would con-
fuse me with this guy named Marden. One time I was walking, and I had my hat
on, and people were shouting, “¡Marden, Marden!” I turned around and went
over and asked, “¿Quién es Marden?” [“Who is Marden?”]. They said, “¡Tú eres
el primo de Marden!” [“You are Marden’s cousin!”]. “No, no, I’m not.” “OK,
bueno,” and nothing ever happened to me. It was a neighborhood with a lot
of problems, where people got robbed, or other things happened, but nothing
ever happened to me. I finally met Marden, the head of La Tropa, one of the
local gangs. In a neighborhood that was mostly indı́gena [indigenous], racially
speaking, Marden was the one criollo6 who was my color and had my type of
curly hair. It’s interesting to me how within this really tough neighborhood, the
racial dynamics and the power dynamics of the country were happening at a
micro-level, and I just happened to step in and benefit from that. You know,
the privileges of looking like Marden probably created this bubble around me.
TA: Couldn’t it have gone the other way?
DA: It could have, I guess, if I had gone into the wrong neighborhood, but dumb
luck has also followed me around my whole life.
MM: You were teaching photography there, right?
DA: Yes, I was teaching—this is 2001-2002—before the digital photography
explosion. It was before every kid had a camera in his/her pocket. It was a good
time to be talking about images; it was a good way to get the kids involved in
discussions. The idea was to have them take photos and then use those photos
to start conversations and have them write descriptions of the images. It was
truly a great experience. The photos themselves were eventually collected in a
book called Imágenes en la ciudad de jóvenes [Images in the City of Youth], a
small publication by a non-governmental organization. It is not a book that
is commercially available—I think I landed one copy—but I kept the images,
and we used them ten years later for [the graphic novel] Ciudad de payasos
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[City of Clowns] (2010) with Sheila Alvarado to create a visual language for that
book.
MM: And these were photos taken by the students, right? What age group, more
or less?
DA: We had students from ages fourteen to eighteen.
MM: Have you stayed in touch with any of them?
DA: Some of them, yes, some of them I see. Not all, but you know, I worked with
forty students total, and there are maybe four or five that I stay in touch with.
MM: Are these students what here in the United States we would label “at risk”
youth, in the sense that they face limited educational opportunities?
DA: Yes, that would be the case. This [San Juan de Lurigancho] is a tough area of
Lima, what used to be known as los conos de Lima, basically the edges of the city.
It’s the area that has grown the most. This part of Lima has experienced the most
economic growth in the last ten years and where every year you see, in dramatic
fashion, how the economy has shifted, changed, and grown in the area. What used
to be houses made of esteras, which are kind of like woven mats, are now one- and
two-story brick housing. Then the brick is covered with tiles, so it changes and
changes. It’s been very dramatic to go back, but I go back every time I can.
TA: How often is that?
DA: Well, every time I’m in Lima. I actually worked in a few neighborhoods in
addition to San Juan de Lurigancho. One is called 10 de octubre, which is at
[bus stop] Paradero 7, Lı́nea Wiese and a few blocks behind the mercado [mar-
ket]. This is the neighborhood where I actually lived. I lived on the same block as
the Aronés family, who took care of me and looked after me, so I always go and
visit them. But then I did a replica of the [photography] project [I had done in
another neighborhood] two neighborhoods up, on the other side of the avenue,
called Cruz de Motupe. I have only been back there once in ten years. I imagine it
looks completely different. That area is where the Mormons were. I actually had a
very interesting thing happen to me in Cruz de Motupe, and this seems almost
bizarre—it’s kind of one of these anecdotes that is difficult to understand. In
Andean thought there is something called the pishtaco7— Mario Vargas Llosa8
has written about this—that steals your organs and is a white man. I went to
do a class in Cruz de Motupe, and the students seemed really into it the first class.
They seemed really excited about the project, but I went back for the second class,
and no one showed up. It turned out that someone else had told them that I was a
pishtaco, and they just did not come back. So that second class was harder. I
actually overcame that designation or that rumor, but still, it was a different tone.
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By virtue of having lived in 10 de octubre, there is always a sort of tension

between the neighborhoods. The story “Flood” in my first book, War by
Candlelight, describes the difference between the kids who live on the other
side of the avenue, and that was the case: Cruz de Motupe was just on the other
side of the avenue and the kids from 10 de octubre, for example, would not go
there. Since I was associated with 10 de octubre, there was a bit of recelo [sus-
picion] against me.
TA: You mentioned the pishtaco. I just finished reading Lituma en los Andes
(1993) [Death in the Andes (1996)] by Vargas Llosa, and there was something
about Lost City Radio (2007) that reminded me of that book. Was this book a
main influence?

DA: I can guarantee you that there is not a direct influence because I haven’t read
it. That’s interesting because I have read a lot of Vargas Llosa, but I haven’t read
that one in particular. I think it’s like it’s in the water, even in “City of Clowns”—
all sorts of young, disaffected journalist characters in Lima seem to be somewhat
based on Zavalita.9 In one way or another, we’re all children of Vargas Llosa.
Vargas Llosa and Julio Ramón Ribeyro10 are the ones who really got at the heart
of the ennui of Lima. Even a book like [Vargas Llosa’s] La ciudad y los perros
(1963) [The Time of the Hero (1966)], even if I could not tell you exactly where
and how, there’s Vargas Llosa in my work, of course. Not only have I accepted
it, I celebrate it, I’m flattered by it.
MM: A few months before the Spanish translation of War by Candlelight came out
in Peru, you mentioned in one of your short pieces your concern regarding the
“spiritual damage”11 that you might face at the hands of Peruvian critics. I’m
wondering if you can say something about the reception of your works in your
home country.
DA: It has been a really great experience. I think in Peru I’m thought of as a
Peruvian writer, and I think that’s not necessarily an obvious way to look at
my work, but that is how it’s been interpreted and accepted. The Peruvian press
treats me as a Peruvian writer who happens to write in English, in part, because
I’m very active in Peruvian literary circles and there are certain projects that I’ve
done like Ciudad de payasos, the graphic novel, that have been specifically for
Peru. My work in Etiqueta Negra is fairly consistently coming out there. I think
on that level I’ve been “accepted.” The concerns that I had were going to be that
someone would say, “He’s not Peruvian, where does he get off writing this stuff ?”
I think that the only defense you have against that is your own knowledge of your
process and how seriously you take your work—that you’re not a parachutist,
you’re not just parachuting in and getting out to do this work. I spent seven years
on that book, so I took it very seriously and I understood the responsibility of
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trying to write about this conflict [Peru’s Civil War]. I think that it shows in the
work, and I’m gratified that the critics in Peru sort of felt the same way.
MM: I find this amazing because not all writers from Latin American countries
born or raised in the US—what we refer to as Latina/o writers—enjoy wide
acclaim in their home countries. On the contrary, at least in the case of US
Puerto Rican writers, for instance, many have been traditionally rejected.
DA: I wonder if that is a class thing. In the case of Chicana/o writers, which I
know more about, Chicana/os in the US tend to be broadly speaking working-
class, and writers in Latin America tend to be broadly speaking upper-/middle-
class. So novels about Chicana/os in the US are, by Mexican literary standards,
thought of as lower-/middle-class literature. I’m sure that is something you have
dealt with in your work, and I wonder what the parallels are in the case of Puerto
Rico. It just happens that in Peru there is no such thing as the Peruvian diaspora.
There is no equivalent of the Chicana/o in Peru. I think that there will be an inter-
esting novel written about the Peruvian community in Santiago de Chile, for
example, at some point or about the Peruvian diaspora in Spain, which is starting
to come back because of the Spanish economic crisis. But most of the novels of
exile have been about Bohemian Peruvians in Paris, which is very different, of
course, from what I’m writing; and the fact that I’m writing in another language
with a set of literary references, in addition to the Peruvian literary references, I
think makes my case somewhat unique.
TA: Do you have any idea if someone like Peruvian American author Marie
Arana12 is viewed in a similar way in Peru?
DA: I’m not sure if Marie’s novels have been published in Peru. I think a couple
have, but I do not think she is as integrated into the Peruvian literary scene. All I
know is that I have not heard young Peruvian writers talking about Marie Arana.
TA: It sounds like she’s not recognized as well as you in Peru, and being a part of
Peru’s literary circles, you conceivably have an idea.
DA: Here in the United States, Marie is a big player and a big “microphone,” but
that microphone is not always translatable. It does not always mean that in your
home country they are going to pay attention. She is the editor of the Washington
Post Book World, which is huge here, but not in Peru. There they would ask,
“What’s the Washington Post Book World?” “Has she written for El Comercio?”
or “Has she written for La República?” That’s what they would ask.
MM: It is not just about class in her case, as you mentioned earlier—because she
is also coming from a middle-/upper-class background—but it is rather about
how she has integrated or not into the home society.
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DA: Well, I think it is also a question of codes. If I say my novel was named best
book of the year by X paper in the United States, they will say, “Ah, okay,” but if
I say I have written for El Paı́s, I write regularly for Etiqueta Negra, and my
columns have come out in El Comercio, then they are going to say, “Yes, I know
who he is.” It is just a question of what people’s literary references are. Sometimes
something happens here in the US that I think is a big deal, and I try to get some
traction talking about it in Peru, but it does not really ring a bell. In the States you
would have to win a Pulitzer or a MacArthur, something like that. I mean, that
would ring a bell there, maybe. Now that I say it, I’m not even sure if a
MacArthur would ring a bell. An amazing thing happened when Lost City
Radio won the 2009 International Literature Prize in Berlin. There was a full
page in one of the newspapers in Lima that said “¡Ganó Alarcón! ” [“Alarcón
won!”], and I saved it because it was like the childhood dreams one has of
being . . .
TA: President or something? [Laughter]
DA: Soccer star or boxer. It was a headline that seemed very sporty as opposed to
literary. It is something that happens when you have a country that is looking for
things to be proud of—food is an example of that. Every time a Peruvian does
well abroad, we celebrate it. Think for instance about Kina Malpartida, a
Peruvian boxer, the first World Champion, and a woman. She has become the
symbol of the strong Peruvian woman. When she fights, more than half of the
television sets in Peru are tuned to that fight. I mean, a fifty percent rating is
insane! I went to see her training in Los Angeles, and the day I went, there were
Peruvians from LA who had just gone to the gym because they heard the rumor
that she was training there, and they just wanted to watch her. This is an intense
kind of identification that happens because we are not a country that’s accus-
tomed to winning. So when someone is successful, there is a tendency to anoint
him or her, and in her case that is what has happened.

TA: I think that the theme of a country not accustomed to winning is something
that we see a lot in your work, right?

DA: Yes, it is certainly something that I remember: my father telling me about

certain Peruvian heroes, but they always seemed to die. They always seemed
to be heroes not because they won but because they died nobly, in defeat. The
Jorge Chávez International Airport in Lima is named after a guy who crashed
as he flew over the Alps, which is like the “Wright Brothers’ Airport.”
[Laughter] It is interesting and it is not an isolated case. There is also a great med-
ical hero named Daniel Carrión; a lot of hospitals are named after him. He was a
guy who was studying some disease and he could not figure it out, so he injected
himself with it, and kept copious notes in his diary as he died. It was a suicidal
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commitment to your cause, science, and everything, but it is also suicidal and not
particularly smart. These are the kinds of heroes that are around, you know.
TA: It is like this line in “City of Clowns” about death being a national pastime,
the national sport.
DA: Yes, the story that deals more directly with that is “A Science for Being
Alone” (2005), which talks about that sort of ethos, the perdedor [the loser].
The old phrase, “Jugamos como nunca, perdimos como siempre” [“We played like
never before, we lost like always”] is kind of a Peruvian motto. There was a pop-
ular t-shirt selling before the last Copa América that had a skeleton with the
Peruvian soccer jersey on it, and on the back it said “Dolor de multitudes”
[“Pain of multitudes”]. I bought it, and every time I wear it people say, “I love
it,” two thumbs up, they love it.
MM: What is your sense of the present state of Latin American literature given
that you worked on the anthology El futuro no es nuestro (2001) [The Future is
Not Ours (2012)]?
DA: I need to clarify that I did not work on that particular anthology although I’m
featured in it. I worked with Diego Trelles, and what we did is that we worked
together on an anthology for Zoetrope, which was based in part on his previous
work. I was asked to edit that issue on new Latin American writers. I was so busy
that I could not do it alone, but I knew Diego had been doing this work, so I asked
him to do it together.
To answer your question, I’m constantly coming across writers who I find very
interesting that I would like to translate. In an ideal world, when I have time to
take on four full-time jobs, I would like to be a full-time novelist, a full-time radio
producer, a full-time translator, and a full-time father/husband. Those are all very
demanding jobs. In a perfect world, if I were a full-time translator, I would never
run out of stuff that I want to translate. Some of the writers that I’m a big fan of
are Alejandro Zambra, who is coming out this year I think with FSG [Farrar,
Straus & Giroux]. I love the work of Samanta Schweblin from Argentina. I think
Yuri Herrera is a tremendous writer from Mexico. I think Mexico in general has a
lot of great writers: Guadalupe Nettel, Diego Osorno (the journalist), Juan
Villoro—of course, I admire him a great deal—Ronaldo Menéndez from
Cuba, and José Manuel Prieto, also Cuban. You know, there is no shortage of
writers out there.
There are problems with distribution, there are problems of how do people
from other countries get to know the work, but I think there have been some great
strides primarily based on the Internet. For instance, there are websites like Los
noveles, which was around for ten years [2001-2011], had thousands of readers,
and was a prestigious venue for new writers to publish. It ran out of Miami by

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a guy named Salvador Luis. It started out as a blog and it became an important
place to get your work noticed. That’s incredible! There you had a consistent
transcontinental conversation happening; writers from all Latin American coun-
tries working in Spanish, Spanish writers from Spain, writers living in the United
States who work in Spanish, it was very international.
TA: You mention this website, Los noveles, and it reminds me of the issue of get-
ting the word out, knowing who is writing what. It makes me think of the paper-
back editions of both of your books, War by Candlelight and Lost City Radio,
which have a section at the end where you list what in your opinion are the
ten most powerful novels from the Latin American canon. This is similar to “get-
ting the word out,” spreading some of your influences. I find it very interesting
that you have José Marı́a Arguedas’s El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo (1971)
[The Fox From Up Above and the Fox From Down Below (2000)]13 on that list;
Argueda is certainly one of the best novelists from twentieth-century Latin
America. I was wondering why you include that book in a list of canonical novels.
DA: Yes, well, the list is totally idiosyncratic, of course, but I love that book. It is
weird, it is totally postmodern, it plays with form, it is the first time that Arguedas
“goes urban,” and he takes this very acute eye, very sharp eye to the city. He goes
and writes about a city called Chimbote, which is just a hellhole, a place that’s
teeming with the smell of fish. It is a very complex urban tapestry where there
are migrants from the coast, there are migrants from the Andes, and there is
the American, a Peace Corps volunteer. It is just a very powerful portrait of this
town. Then you add to that the letters to his editor, which are sort of interlaid in
the book, and then you add to that the personal tragedy that this was basically a
long suicide note. It is such a moving book for that reason. It is not a perfect
novel—most novels are not—but it accomplishes something that I really respect:
it brings a vision of Andean cosmology and takes it to the city, so you get to see
not just the Andean world but the Andean world interacting with the world of
urban mestizaje and the international world in the person of this American
and the idea of the fish processing that is going to go all over the world. No longer
the rural idyll, it is something much bigger.
There is another thing and that is my personal affinity with Arguedas, because
I have always thought of myself as not too distant from him in terms of language.
He writes in Spanish about worlds that he saw living in Quechua, and I write in
English about worlds that I imagine living in Spanish. There is a kind of paral-
lelism in terms of our use of language; thus, I have always felt a certain kinship
with him. Some of his books I think are better than others. Some are perhaps too
modular, too nostalgic, and I think some writers in Peru sort of stay away from
that, but he has a lot of heart, and that book is the one that I would keep from his
work.
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TA: It is interesting, too, because I think it was Alberto Moreiras, a professor at

Duke at the time, who has a blurb on the back of the English language translation
of the novel saying how The Fox From Up Above and the Fox From Down Below
was chronologically right in the middle of the Latin American Boom14 but that it
was not a part of it. Could you say the same thing about Arguedas in general?
DA: Yes, Arguedas was a guy who did not fit well within the Boom. Back then you
had Julio Cortázar’s worldly, brilliant urban novels such as Rayuela (1963)
[Hopscotch (1966)], and you have Vargas Llosa doing his thing. Arguedas did
not fit. He did not fit into the worldliness of it all. He was not cosmopolitan.
And when he writes this novel, I think he was really hurt by being considered
an “indigenous” writer as opposed to just a writer. And I think he was hurt by
the notion that writing about the indigenous world made you ineligible for con-
sideration in the urbane world of letters. I think that was very troubling for him.
He says so in the letters; the pain is very raw. It is not dissimilar to what happens
to US Latina/o writers. Often white writers are praised for their imagination and
for their audacity, you know? And Latina/o writers and writers of color in general
are often praised for being so real, as if it is just reportage and not art. There is a
fallacy and a certain kind of prejudice in that. I think that Arguedas felt that he
was a victim of that prejudice, and he certainly had an argument to make.
MM: Following up on that, the connection between the local and the global seems
to be such a central concern in your works. Many of the stories are set in Peru, but
at the same time they are addressing issues that are much larger in scale. Can you
talk about that?
DA: Well, I think Lost City Radio is a good example because I think I have had a
chance to see how the work is interpreted in different countries. In case it was not
clear to me already, it brought home what a privilege it has been, over the years, to
go to different countries and talk about this book and hear what people have to
say about it; but also how the vision and the reading of each book is contingent on
the history and culture of the place where it has been read. It reminds me of a
Chilean friend who says he always thought of The Smiths as a Chilean band
because he heard them at parties in Santiago de Chile in the 1980s, and so his
cultural context did not make any difference—it did not even occur to him that
the words were in English—it was not relevant because he was dancing to this
music with Chilean girls, so the music became Chilean. This novel, Lost City
Radio, has been published in Germany, where it was interpreted as a kind of
post-World War II aftermath and legacy of the crimes of the Nazis. In Chile it
was a Pinochet novel; in Colombia it was a FARC [Fuerzas Armadas
Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forced of Columbia)] novel;
in Peru, of course, it was what it was; in the United States it was a war on terror
novel; in Argentina it was a dirty war novel; and on and on and on. In different
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countries it had all these different interpretations. For me, it has been eye open-
ing: I write something, and I’m thinking of the characters, the scenes, the story-
line, the arc of the novel, very local decisions, but local in terms of within the
context of the story itself. Then you put it out in the world, and it gets published
and translated, and anything can happen.
TA: What do you think about the fact that some people have made the compar-
ison between Lost City Radio and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), for
example, or other works of science fiction?
DA: Yes, that is interesting. I do not read a lot of science fiction, so it was not the
first thing that occurred to me. I mean, there are certain dystopic elements to the
book that I think would push it in that direction, but I definitely wanted it to be
hovering just above what we would think of as reality. I want the world of the
novel to seem very real, and seem very alive, very concrete. That was my goal.
I do not think of it as a novel that is not realistic. I think it is troublingly realistic.
It is perhaps a darker version of the postwar period in Peru, but the elements of
the ten years of Fujimori15 are there. It is not only a protest novel against
Fujimori, it is a novel written in the Bush years, and it is very much that. It is
a Bush novel, too.
TA: It is interesting that you mention how it’s been interpreted in so many dif-
ferent places because obviously you made some effort not to focus too much on
Peru, as opposed to your stories, of course, where Peru is everywhere, in the
names of places, and so forth. At the same time, I felt that an informed reader,
someone who knows a lot about Peruvian history, would think, “Well, this is
Peru—the geographical descriptions, the desert, the city on the coast.” Is this
a very Peruvian novel in your mind?
DA: Yes, there is no way to escape the “Peruvianness” of my work, the city that I
spend a lot of time writing about—in the new book also—and the geography, the
culture, and the history. My references, my first Latin American references, and
the ones that I know the best are Peruvian. I think there are certain things that
you could look at and say—that’s Ghanaian—a lot of the names of the neighbor-
hoods are from Accra, a city that I lived in for six months in 1998. If you are look-
ing for Peruvian, you will find Peru, but if you were looking for Ethiopian, you
would find Ethiopia. In my book there are lots of things, for example what I call
tadek,16 based on something from a book called The Emperor (1978), by Ryszard
Kapuściński, about the fall of Haile Selassie.17 It is called labasha in that book, but
it is exactly what I describe as tadek. These weird, serendipitous things happened.
For example, I learned through a friend who was doing Peace Corps work in
Senegal that the word for medicine and the word for tree were the same, so I
put that in the book because I liked it. Then a friend of mine told me that in
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certain dialects in the Peruvian jungle that is also the case, but I had gotten it from
somewhere else and put it in the book because I liked it. Those kinds of things you
cannot foresee. I have had people in Peru congratulating me for having done my
homework and having gone out of my way to incorporate the indigenous lan-
guages and this and that, and I would love to take credit for that and say that
I have, but I did not. I think they are just things that happened. Zadie Smith18
has a great essay about how the world of the novel takes over the world that
you live in. She describes that good fortune that happens when you are really
tuned in to the hum of a book, and it happens that the world offers up these gifts.
That has certainly been the case, where I had an idea based on something else and
it turns out to match up with the world that people think I’m describing.
TA: That would certainly explain some of the multinational appeal of the novel
and all these peoples in different places that have no problem understanding it.
MM: It is amazing that so many different people can relate to it. It must be the
dream for any writer to be able to touch so many readers across the world.
DA: Definitely, that part has been just a privilege, a joy. I also have had a lot of
people say, “What if Peru were an invented country?” “What if I made it up?” It
would still be recognizable to a lot of people because the issues that you see in the
developing world are issues that you see everywhere. Which is why Macondo19 is
so universal: it is American in some ways, you know, the old South; it is
Mediterranean; it is Caribbean; and, of course, African. It is something that
speaks to a shared historical past.
MM: I’m not an expert in Peruvian literature—you of course are very much in
tune with that scene—is it fair to say that you are one of the first authors to
address the Peruvian Civil War20 in your works?
DA: I do not think it is fair to say that. I think it is more correct to say that even
during the war there were a lot of writers who did—Miguel Gutiérrez was one of
the most important exponents of this, and there were others such as Dante Castro.
Some of them were sparse and very radical left writers. There is a great writer
named Julio Durán, who wrote a very fascinating novel about Lima in the late
1980s and early 1990s when the punks and the kind of hard core music under-
ground—just by virtue of sharing the same social space—were rubbing elbows
with the senderistas [members of the Shining Path]. It is a very interesting work
called Incendiar la ciudad [Burning the City] (2002). Other writers, such as Martı́n
Roldán, who has a novel called Generación Cochebomba [Carbomb Generation]
(2007), published works that came out before mine. Some of these books did
not get much press.
TA: Could it be because they were written in Spanish?
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DA: Yes, because they were written in Spanish and they are written for people
who are outsiders, not sort of the mainstream—they weren’t getting interviews
in El Comercio, you know? Julio Durán’s book and Martı́n’s first edition of his
book were both self-published. Martı́n has since gone on to write a book that
was published by a major house, but again, I do not think he got a lot of press.
Miguel Gutiérrez is kind of the padrino of this group and has done a lot to support
them, and Miguel, of course, is super well known and widely respected. Dante
Castro Arrasco also has a book called Parte de combate [Combat Report]
(1991). What happens is that around the same time that my book came out in
Peru, Santiago Roncagliolo’s Abril rojo [Red April] (2006) and Alonso Cueto’s
La hora azul [The Blue Hour] (2005) also came out and won big awards. Cueto
won the Premio Planeta and Santiago won the Premio Herralde.21 So the coinci-
dence that those three novels all came out within a year put this issue on the map,
to use the cliché, in a very real way.
TA: I’m curious about Peruvian cinema. Are there are any particular films that
you find interesting given the issues you address in your works?
DA: I really like Los dı́as de Santiago [Days of Santiago] (2004), by Josué Méndez,
and I also like Claudia Llosa’s work. Those are two filmmakers whose work I most
admire. Josué and Claudia—Claudia made Madeinusa (2006) and La teta
asustada [The Milk of Sorrow] (2009)—I think they are both incredibly talented
filmmakers. And to go back to the issue of winners, of people loving winners, La
teta asustada was a film that had not done super well in Lima when it won the
2009 Golden Bear Award.22 So when Claudia’s film won Best Film in Berlin,
and when Magaly Solier won Best Actress that year, people went crazy for her.
Magaly became a huge star; she went from being sort of an unknown actress
to farándula [celebrity] like that [snap of fingers], and it is because peruanos love
a winner. Claudia’s a superstar in Peru, and rightly so.
TA: What about films like La boca del lobo [The Wolf’s Mouth] (2010) or Paloma
de papel [Paper Dove] (2005)? Have you seen those films?
DA: La boca del lobo is a famous one. I have not seen it in years. Francisco
Lombardi is a good guy who has done a lot of important work. He did
Pantaleón y las visitadoras (1973) [Captain Pantoja and the Special Service
(1978)], one of the best adaptations of Vargas Llosa’s works, very well done,
and a very entertaining film.
MM: Is there anything you can share with us about your new novel?
DA: Yes, I’m going to read a little bit from it tomorrow night.23 I can say I have
been working on it for five years. I can say I have written about six hundred pages,
and that most of it I won’t use. Most of it I’m not using. There was a story that
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appeared in The New Yorker called “The Idiot President” that forms part of the
backdrop of this novel. There was another story published in The New Yorker
more recently called “Second Lives” that tells the story of two brothers and that
also forms part of the novel’s backstory. Those are the two major strands of the
piece.
TA: Five years and six hundred pages. That’s a lot of work!
DA: Yes it is. I have a month coming up at Marfa,24 so I’m hoping that I will be
able to get very close to being done when I’m there.
MM: As a literary critic of US Latina/o literature, I wonder whether or not you see
yourself as part of that cultural landscape. Of course, here in the US you are con-
sidered a US Latino author, based on your upbringing.
DA: Yes, actually something just happened. I’m giving a reading later this
November [2011] at a university in California, and they sent me the poster so that
I could see it. I was not going to look at it because I’m super busy, but I decided to
preview it, and it said “Peruvian author” in bold. They sent me two things, the
poster and the press release, and the press release also had the title “Peruvian
author Daniel Alarcón.” What was odder to me was that in the press release it
said that I grew up in the United States since age three and that I wrote in
English, all things that would make you think that I’m an American writer, but
then it says, in bold font, that I’m a Peruvian author. I guess I don’t mind that,
but I do think of myself as an American writer, as well. The thing is that Peruvian
American does not roll off the tongue particularly well, and people get confused—
it does not really make any sense to them. I wrote the person a brief email saying,
“Hey, I do write in English and I’ve been raised in the US since age three, so I
don’t know if ‘Peruvian’ is quite exact.” In the end she just changed it to “young.”
So now it says “young author.” [Chuckles]
TA: There’s a big difference!
DA: Yes, there is a very big difference, but it is also not better. You can just put
“author.” At that point I did not write again because I thought it is not a big deal
and I have too much on my plate to worry about it.
MM: I hope you like our poster! I used “Peruvian American.”
DA: You know, I think Latina/o is one of those words that doesn’t mean quite as
much in Latin America as it means here. In this context [the United States], I
guess I do not mind it. I definitely do not think about it much, and it certainly
has nothing to do with the process of writing my work. I sort of think of it in
the same way that I think of what I was describing as the reception of the novel,
how the novel is received in different countries. It is a matter of you writing it and
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then you put it out there; in Germany it will be this, in Canada it will be that, and
in Japan it’ll be something else. That is just a fact. If people want to call me a
Latino writer, that’s fine. It is funny because if in Peru they called me
“American author Daniel Alarcón,” that would kind of sting a little bit.
Similarly, you know, I was named in the “Best 20 Under 40” by The New
Yorker and Best American novelist by Granta, and then for a university in the
United States to disown me, and basically say that I’m a Peruvian author, and sort
of put me on the “no fly list” or something, it just feels kind of disrespectful.
TA: If I can follow up because there’s a question I wanted to ask. This might be a
technicality, but Francisco Goldman, the Guatemalan American author, has said,
“American literature whether in English or Spanish comprises one rowdy glorious
family, as Borges knew.” Where do you fit in that rowdy family? What does
Borges mean here by “American”? Goldman would consider himself American,
but he seems to be calling Borges American, too.
DA: He means americano, in the sense of norte, centro, y sur [north, central, and
south]. And it is certainly something we have been thinking about, and we talk
about this a lot because Francisco is going to be working with Radio
Ambulante, our radio project, that is thinking about the Americas as one cultural
region. In our case we are thinking of it as a cultural region united by Spanish, a
region that would include Spanish-speaking Latin America but also the United
States. We are still trying to figure out what to do with Brazil, but Spanish is a
dominant language of this geographical region. I imagine that his quote goes
somewhere along those lines. Now the issue: I read in English and read in
Spanish and can flip back and forth between the two, but the majority of what
I have read is in English. It just so happens that when I’m writing, I’m bringing
a different set of cultural signifiers and literary influences to bear on my work, and
that shows why I’m a different type of writer than, say, a writer my age working in
Peru, perhaps. I was just with Santiago Roncagliolo25 in Barcelona and he said,
“Me siento tan a gusto con los ingleses” [“I feel so comfortable among English
authors”]. You know, he just loves reading British writers. He knows more about
contemporary British literature than I do. He loves American authors, he loves
reading in English, and he just likes English. He writes in Spanish, and he is never
going to stop writing in Spanish, but his influences are different, you know?
Patricio Pron, the Argentine writer, was schooled in Germany and reads
German writers, lived in Germany for years, and now is in Madrid. He has a dif-
ferent style. All I’m saying is that I hope that my calling card is not simply that I’m
bringing American or English influences into Latin American literature, and that
is obviously not something that is unique to me, and it is going to become less and
less special. More and more writers are multilingual or are traveling more. It used
to be that the Boom writers went to Paris and got to read books that they could
not have read in Peru, and it is just not the case anymore. There is going to be
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much more cross-fertilization happening, and that is a good thing. I’m jealous of
a writer like Pron who can read in German. I read a lot of German writers, I love
German writers, but I read them in English.
MM: And Radio Ambulante?
DA: Radio Ambulante is such a great project. I’m so excited by it and we are in the
production stage of the pilotos. We just did our first convocatoria [call for pitches]
for crónicas [chronicles]. We sent a call for pitches and got more than fifty pitches
from more than a dozen countries. I mean, it is just an incredible response. This
kind of radio does not exist in Spanish, so the possibility that people are starting
to understand that we can create a space to tell these kinds of stories in audio is
just very exciting.
MM: It is modeled on National Public Radio’s This American Life, is that correct?
DA: It is kind of the idea of This American Life in Spanish, but transnational. The
idea is to take the aesthetics of a good piece of nonfiction and put it into audio,
which is what you hear on American radio all the time. We love American radio;
it’s incredibly creative. As someone said recently, if you had to pick a novel by a
young American writer, a first novel, or an episode of This American Life, any
random episode, in terms of narrative quality, on average you should choose
This American Life. The question is why this aesthetic, this type of storytelling,
has not yet arrived in Latin America when we are above average for radio con-
sumption in every age group. As US Latina/os, we download more podcasts than
any other minority group in the United States. In Latin America, I do not have to
tell you, the radio is on in the house all day. Then you hear US Latina/o radio, and
it is mostly politics and health call-in shows, chisme [gossip], and música, which is
fine, but there is enough talk radio that I think that we can find an hour for this
kind of storytelling, and I think it could be successful. In Latin America, talking to
friends who work in radio, we tell them we want a seven minute piece on this, and
they say, “No, nadie te va a escuchar siete minutos, estás loco” [“No, no one is
going to listen to you for seven minutes, you’re crazy”]. You know, This
American Life does forty-five minute pieces, and it’s incredibly time consuming
and it’s a lot of work, but I just do not think it’s true that people will not listen. I
just think they have not heard it yet.
The other thing that people have been telling us is, “Well, Mexicans don’t want
to hear about Uruguayans, and Bolivians don’t want to hear about Chileans, and
Puerto Ricans don’t want to hear about Mexicans.” I think that’s bullshit. I think
that’s an old and outdated view of the provincialisms that used to reign in Latin
America. It does not have to be a massive audience. That is the beauty of the
Internet; we do not have to have fifty thousand listeners in Mexico City. The fact
of the matter is that there is a mobile creative class in all Latin American countries
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that is reading [the website] Los noveles, reading El Paı́s, subscribing to blogs—
literary blogs—in other countries, participating in global conversations, and that
would want to hear these stories and does not have the opportunity to hear them
anywhere else because nothing like that exists anywhere else. Yes, we are very
excited. We have stories in production now in Barcelona, Lima, LA, Havana, el
Distrito Federal (Mexico City), Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Santiago de Chile,
and Bogotá.
MM: We are looking forward to it. Thank you Daniel Alarcón, it has been a plea-
sure speaking with you.
TA: Yes, thank you for your time.
DA: Thank you both for the opportunity.

Notes
1. Mestizaje “refers to the process of racial intermixing, and it also has the added
connotations of cultural admixture, a Latin American synonym for hybridity
or syncretism” (Allatson 158).
2. “Radio Ambulante: Spanish-Language Radio Program Showcases the Untold
Stories of the Americas” aired 3 January 2013 on Democracy Now! with Amy
Goodman and Juan González (“Radio”).
3. Daniel Alarcón’s visit was made possible by a Henkels Lecture Series grant from
the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at the University of Notre Dame.
4. This neologism derives from the terms North American and Incan to mark the
combination of these two backgrounds.
5. The term gringo is used in Spanish-speaking countries to refer to people from the
US. Although there are several theories about its origins, most agree that it is not
a pejorative term although it can sometimes be used negatively.
6. According to Paul Allatson, “Creole and its Spanish equivalent criollo were terms
for defining local-born European inhabitants of the Americas during the
European colonial era. The term distinguished local-born Europeans from those
born in the imperial center, as well as from indigenous, African, and mixed-race
colonial subjects” (82).
7. The pishtaco is an Andean mythological figure similar to a boogeyman. He is a
white man who steals and kills indigenous people for their body fat.
8. Mario Vargas Llosa (1936-) is celebrated as the most important writer in the his-
tory of Peruvian letters and one of the most important Latin American writers.
He was a key member of the Latin American Boom in the 1960s and has pub-
lished dozens of books. He is also a politician, journalist, and essayist who
received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010. He wrote about pishtacos in his
1993 novel Lituma en los Andes [Death in the Andes] (1996).

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9. Zavalita is the nickname of Santiago Zavala, the main character in Mario Vargas
Llosa’s acclaimed novel Conversación en la Catedral (1969) [Conversation in the
Cathedral (1975)]. The plot revolves around the conversation between Zavalita,
the son of a minister, and Ambrosio, his father’s chauffeur, at the bar known as
the Cathedral. The novel explores class dynamics as well as government corrup-
tion in 1950s Peru, with a focus on Manuel A. Odrı́a’s dictatorship.
10. Julio Ramón Ribeyro (1929-94) was a prestigious Peruvian author of short sto-
ries, novels, essays, and theater. He is considered one of Latin America’s most
celebrated short story writers.
11. The notion of spiritual damage is referenced in his piece “The Writing Life”
(2006).
12. Marie Arana (1949-) was born in Peru and moved to the US with her family at the
age of nine. She is the author of three novels—American Chica (2001),
Cellophane (2006), and Lima Nights (2009)—and Bolı́var: American Liberator
(2013), a biography of Simón Bolı́var. She is also a journalist and editor. She
was the Editor-in-Chief of The Washington Post’s “Book World” and is now
Writer at Large for that newspaper.
13. José Marı́a Arguedas (1911-69) was a Peruvian novelist, poet, and anthropologist
of Spanish and Quechua descent. He is celebrated as one of Peru’s most impor-
tant literary figures and admired for the detailed and compassionate representa-
tion of indigenous cultures in his works.
14. The Boom refers to the period in the 1960s and 1970s when Latin American prose
fiction flourished at an unprecedented rate. The reasons for this were many,
including the overlap in publication of novels by major authors, a renewed inter-
est in Latin American affairs spurred by the Cuban Revolution, and the proactive
role of the editorial house Seix Barral in Barcelona, Spain. Among the key figures
of the Boom are Gabriel Garcı́a Márquez, Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, and
Mario Vargas Llosa.
15. Alberto Fujimori was president of Peru from 1990-2000. He remains a controver-
sial figure as a result of the scandals surrounding his presidency. Although he has
been credited for fighting terrorism and virtually eliminating the terrorist orga-
nization The Shining Path, he was accused of human rights violations and was
sentenced to jail on corruption charges.
16. In Alarcón’s Lost City Radio, tadek refers to a form of justice carried out in
remote areas of the jungle where people who commit offenses, such as stealing,
are punished by having their hands cut off.
17. Ryszard Kapuściński (1932-2007) is a Polish journalist who published the book
The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat (1978), which is about the fall of Haile
Selassie’s regime in Ethiopia and is also considered an allegory of the Polish gov-
ernment.
18. Zadie Smith (1975-) is a British novelist, short story writer, and essayist. Some of
her works include White Teeth (2000), On Beauty (2005), and NW (2012).

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19. Macondo is the name of the fictitious town of Gabriel Garcı́a Márquez’s Cien años
de soledad [One Hundred Years of Solitude] (1967). This former banana planta-
tion town that had a golden past is practically transformed into a ghost town as a
result of the banana company’s closure. Despite the trials that its citizens encoun-
ter, its name has become synonymous with magical realism.
20. This period of internal conflict in Peru—in which about 70,000 people lost their
lives—took place between 1980 and 2000. During the Civil War, the Peruvian
government fought against the terrorist groups the Shining Path and Tupc
Amaru Revolutionary Movement. Most of the victims of the war were civilians
with no ties to these terrorist organizations. The death toll makes it one of the
most violent conflicts in Latin American history.
21. The Premio Planeta de Novela, established in 1952, is one of the most prestigious
literary prizes and is awarded by the Spanish publisher Grupo Planeta to a novel
written in Spanish. Likewise, the Premio Herralde is a literary prize awarded by
Editorial Anagrama to a novel written in Spanish.
22. The Golden Bear Award is the most prestigious prize awarded at the Berlin
International Film Festival to the best film every year.
23. Our interview took place the day before Alarcón was scheduled to read from his
then forthcoming novel, At Night We Walk in Circles. Tomorrow night refers to 4
October 2011.
24. Marfa, Texas is home to the Lannan Residency Fellowship, providing
“uninterrupted writing time for poets, writers, essayists, scholars, and curators,
as well as indigenous, environmental, and social justice activists. Residency dura-
tions are usually from one to two months. Since the fall of 2000, close to two hun-
dred residency fellows have been housed in Lannan properties in Marfa,
Texas . . .” (“Lannan”).
25. Santiago Roncagliolo (1975-) is a Peruvian writer, translator, journalist, and
scriptwriter. His novel Abril rojo [Red April] won the Premio Alfaguara in 2006.

Works Cited
Alarcón, Daniel. “All Politics Is Local: Election Night in Peru’s Largest Prison.”
Harper’s Magazine Feb. 2012: 35-44. Harper’s Magazine. Web. 11 July 2013.
—. “City of Clowns.” Alarcón, War 17-56.
—. Ciudad de payasos. Illus. Sheila Alvarado. Lima: Alfaguara, 2010. Print.
—. “Daniel Alarcón’s Internal Migrations.” Interview by Vinnie Wilhelm. Loggernaut
Reading Series. Loggernaut.org, 2005. Web. 11 July 2013.
—. “The Idiot President.” The New Yorker. Condé Nast, 6 Oct. 2008. Web. 11 July
2013.
—. “A Science for Being Alone.” Alarcón, War 153-74.
—. “Second Lives.” The New Yorker. Condé Nast, 16 Aug. 2010. Web. 11 July 2013.
—. War by Candlelight. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. Print.

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—. “The Writing Life.” The Washington Post. The Washington Post, 23 July 2006.
Web. 11 July 2013.
Allatson, Paul. Key Terms in Latino/a Cultural and Literary Studies. Malden:
Blackwell, 2007. Print.
“Lannan Residency Program.” Lannan Foundation. Lannan Foundation, 2013. Web.
11 July 2013.
“Project.” Radio Ambulante. Radio Ambulante, 2012. Web. 11 July 2013.
“Radio Ambulante: Spanish-Language Radio Program Showcases the Untold Stories
of the Americas.” Democracy Now! Democracy Now! 7 Feb. 2013. Web. 11 July
2013. Transcript.

Selected Works by Daniel Alarcón

Fiction
At Night We Walk in Circles. New York: Riverhead, 2013. Print.
Ciudad de payasos. Illus. Sheila Alvarado. Lima: Alfaguara, 2010. Print.
El rey siempre está por encima del pueblo. Trans. Jorge Cornejo. Lima: Seix Barral,
2009. Print.
“The Idiot President.” The New Yorker. Condé Nast, 6 Oct. 2008. Web. 11 July 2013.
Lost City Radio. New York: HarperCollins, 2007. Print.
War by Candlelight. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. Print.

Nonfiction
“All Politics Is Local: Election Night in Peru’s Largest Prison.” Harper’s Magazine Feb.
2012: 35-44. Harper’s Magazine. Web. 11 July 2013.
The Secret Miracle: The Novelist’s Handbook. Ed. Daniel Alarcón. New York: Holt,
2010. Print.

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