June/July 2005
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At an age when most short-story writers are in thrall to either Carver-style earnestness or McSweenian irony, Daniel Alarcón is already on another plane. The Lima-born, Alabama-raised 24-year-old’s debut collection examines the lives of those just slightly off the globalizing grid—whether they’re gangbanging kids in Peru at the mercy of a war beyond their control or an Indian-American woman in New York afraid to tell her conservative mother about her boyfriend. Throughout the book, Alarcón tosses off one casual, beautiful, devastating line after another (“My mother had capitulated. It gave me vertigo. It was the kind of humiliation only a life like hers could prepare you for.”), announcing the arrival of a Lahiri-like talent to keep an eye on.