Friday, November 13, 2015

LatAm Minute: Daniel Alarcón on Arrogant Writers and Generous Radio Producers

By Holly K. Sonneland

The author launched his latest work, the graphic novel City of Clowns, at AS/COA on November 5.

<div style="clear:both;"> Back in 2002, author Daniel Alarcón moved from his native Lima to the cornfields of Iowa. In “a desperate attempt to capture the city I’d just left,” he wrote nonstop over the next three weeks while at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. “[I’ve] never before, never since written a piece in that sort of fugue state,” he said at a recent event at the Americas Society in New York. The result was the 75-page first draft of what would become his short story “City of Clowns.” The following year, The New Yorker published the work <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/06/16/city-of-clowns" target="_blank">in its fiction issue</a>, and the rest, for Alarcón’s writing career at least, is history. “That really was the moment,” he said. “It’s a very important story for me.” A few years later, with a couple published novels under his belt, Alarcón was talking with friend and illustrator Sheila Alvarado. Someone had given Alarcón a copy of Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Goražde, a journalistic comic book-style account of the Bosnian War, and, intrigued by the medium, Alarcón wanted to know what, if any, of his novels Alvarado could see translating into a graphic work. “City of Clowns,” she said without hesitation. The two spent the next 18 months collaborating on a translation of the printed text into a graphic novel—spending hours with Skype open, holding up sketches to the camera. “You don’t need as many adjectives,” he found in the process. “It was great to be able to leave the description of that baroque Lima to Sheila.” The result is 144 pages of full-page, grayscale illustrations in which, among other things, a bus becomes a big-tent theater, piraña street crime gangs morph into carnivorous fish, and a young reporter journeys into the garish and glum world of Lima’s street clowns in an attempt to get closer to his late father. Americas Society’s Literature Department hosted <a href="http://www.as-coa.org/events/launch-daniel-alarc%C3%B3ns-city-clowns">the launch</a> of <a href="http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/316788/city-of-clowns-by-daniel-alarcon-sheila-alvarado/9781594633331/" target="_blank">the graphic novel</a> with Riverhead Books in New York on November 5. Before the event, Alarcón sat down with AS/COA Online to talk about the ego of novelists, the camaraderie of the radio community (he also found time in the last few years to launch the long-form journalism podcast <a href="http://radioambulante.org/en/" target="_blank">Radio </a><a href="http://radioambulante.org/en/" target="_blank">Ambulante</a>), and how reviews, of course, are not written by idiots. </div>

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LatAm Minute: Daniel Alarcón on Arrogant Writers and Generous Radio Producers

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