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The New York Times Book Review [296 K pdf]
March 25, 2007 - "[Lost City Radio] has the same vigor that made Alarcón's debut collection War by Candlelight such a delight. Alarcón is talented--and wise--beyond his years."

Hispanic Magazine [28 K pdf]
March 2007 - "A masterful display of sustained tone and mood. Alarcón [has] the uncommon maturity and necessarily cold eye of an emerging master..."

Cleveland Plain-Dealer [80 K pdf]
March 3, 2007 - "Daniel Alarcón writes with a poet's heart and a reporter's skill... [He] describes with beautiful, succinct prose how opposing sensibilities - loyalty and treachery, tenderness and brutality - can co-exist in the same body, the same place, like dandelions poking through chunks of broken asphalt."

KQED San Francisco
February 27, 2007 - "A book so insanely good that I've been forcing it on everyone I know... Alarcón is the real deal."

Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award Citation
April 2, 2006 - War by Candlelight is as urgent and inflamed as the urban front, but its distinction is that it never yields to the sensational or surrenders its attentiveness to intimate emotion. Daniel Alarcón chronicles vividly both the pain of exile and the entrapments of poverty and the absence of hope. His book is a thrillingly fiery debut, fierce but wrought with impressive care.

Washington Post Book World
August 15, 2005 - Alarcón’s fierce, stylish and intricate stories announce a prodigious talent. 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.

New York Post [228 K pdf]
April 13, 2005 - A stunning fiction debut.

San Francisco Magazine [80 K pdf]
May 2005 - Gripping. His artistry is exhilarating and sometimes his spare prose can make you cry.

The Economist
April 7, 2005 - War by Candlelight is weighty and earnest. There's no doubting Mr. Alarcón's seriousness and ambition. He is one to watch.

Kirkus Reviews
January 1, 2005 - Alarcón jumps right in with a fearlessness that becomes his most striking quality. The extremes of death and war and poverty are what impel Alarcón to his best work. A rare combination of technical accomplishment and generous heart.

The 3 Halves of Ino Moxo
by Cesar Calvo, Kenneth A. SymingtonWhen Manuel Cordova-Rios was 13 years old, a tribe of Amahuaca Indians kidnapped him; he adopted the name Ino Moxo (Black Panther) and eventually became high priest of the hallucinogenic powers of the ayahuasca plant used in religious ceremonies. Calvo's quest to the inner sanctum of the shaman's domain resembles the mystical journeys of Carlos Castenada.

The Peru Reader: History, Culture, Politics
(Paperback))
by Orin Starn, Carlos Ivan Degregori, Robin Kirk
"This book is as indispensable for the first-time visitor to Peru as for the serious student of Latin American history and culture."--Michael F. Brown, author of War of Shadows: The Struggle for Utopia in the Peruvian Amazon MORE INFO and Excerpts

The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey

by Ernesto Che Guevara
These travel diaries capture the essence and exuberance of the young legend, Che Guevara. In January 1952, Che set out from Buenos Aires to explore South America on an ancient Norton motorcycle. He encounters an extraordinary range of people -- from native Indians to copper miners, lepers and tourists -- experiencing hardships and adventures that informed much of his later life.The Monkey's Paw: New Chronicles from Peru
by Robin Kirk

Combining interviews and personal narrative, the author presents a portrait of the turbulent history of Peru, starting in 1983 when the Shining Path guerillas plunged the country into crisis. She explores why so many Peruvian women felt compelled to join the terrorists.  

Deep Rivers
by Jose Maria Arguedas, Frances Horning Barraclough (Translator)

"An essential part of the canon of the new Latin American literature."  New Yorker

José María Arguedas is one of the few Latin American authors who loved and described his natural surroundings, and he ranks among the greatest writers of any time and place. He saw the beauty of the Peruvian landscape, as well as the grimness of social conditions in the Andes, through the eyes of the Indians who are a part of it. Ernesto, the narrator of Deep Rivers, is a child with origins in two worlds.