City of Clowns

by Daniel Alarcón, Sheila Alvarado

Overview

A gorgeously rendered graphic novel of Daniel Alarcón’s story City of Clowns. From the author of The King Is Always Above the People, which was longlisted for the 2017 National Book Award for Fiction.

Oscar “Chino” Uribe is a young Peruvian journalist for a local tabloid paper. After the recent death of his philandering father, he must confront the idea of his father’s other family, and how much of his own identity has been shaped by his father’s murky morals. At the same time, he begins to chronicle the life of street clowns, sad characters who populate the violent and corrupt city streets of Lima, and is drawn into their haunting, fantastical world.

This remarkably affecting story by Daniel Alarcón was included in his acclaimed first book, War by Candlelight, and now, in collaboration with artist Sheila Alvarado, it takes on a new, thrilling form. This graphic novel, with its short punches of action and images, its stark contrasts between light and dark, truth and fiction, perfectly corresponds to the tone of Chino’s story. With the city of Lima as a character, and the bold visual language from the story, City of Clowns is moving, menacing, and brilliantly vivid.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781594633331
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/03/2015
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Daniel Alarcón is the author of the National Book Award finalist story collection The King Is Always Above the People, 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 in 2010, he was named one of the New Yorker's "20 under 40." He is Executive Producer of Radio Ambulante, and teaches at the Columbia University School of Journalism in New York. 
 
Sheila Alvarado is an artist, illustrator, and author. She lives in Lima, Peru.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for City of Clowns

"The tale takes on a breathtaking new dimension... Dynamic... [A] haunted atmosphere permeates every page. Alvarado renders Alarcón's source material in stark black and white, a scratchy yet refined style that's full of deep shadows and woodcut-like crosshatching. But it's her composition that truly brings City of Clowns to life. Rather than relying on a typical comic-book grid, Alvarado employs an inventive architecture of panels; some float in fields of negative space, while others are framed as bricks in a wall or sheets drying on a line. At certain points, she abandons panels altogether in favor of a more flowing, expressionist layout. Even her most daring experiments in form, though, succeed in thoughtfully conveying the pensive tone and subtext of Alarcón's meditation on guilt, regret, and forgiveness — and sometimes the gut-punching lack thereof." 
—NPR

“Sheila Alvarado lends visual brilliance to Alarcon’s affecting tale.”
—Entertainment Weekly

"Fantastical."
—Vanity Fair

“The story of Chino and his father is told in equal parts narration and flashback, with simple, black and white illustrations by Sheila Alvarado that complement Alarcón's understated yet poignant prose . . . Alarcón writes in simple, conversational language that makes for an easy read while also evoking a sense of intimacy, that quality more often associated with memoirs than fiction. It's that very directness that Alarcón employs to great effect; reading City of Clowns I had the sense that I was being made privy to a story at once profoundly personal and also universal.”
—Chicago Tribune

“This graphic-novel adaptation strips the original short story to its essential elements but loses none of the rawness or tension. In stark black and white, Alvarado’s illustrations intensify the sentiment of the text through visual interpretations ranging from literal to purely fantastical. Frequently stunning in their clarity and economy, the illustrations give this already complex story an added layer of richness and depth. Darkly satisfying but with no easy endings.”
—Booklist


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.”
—Los Angeles Times

“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 

From the Publisher

06/15/2015
A New Yorker "20 Under 40" author whose Lost City Radio won the 2009 International Literature Award, Alarcón offers a graphic novel version of a story drawn from his first publication, War by Candlelight, featuring a young Peruvian journalist named Oscar "Chino" Uribe wrestling with the sins of his father after his death—and meeting the man's second family. He also begins chronicling the sad-faced street clowns of tumultuous Lima. Written in English, translated into Spanish for the graphic novel, and now translated back into English.

Library Journal

2015-08-17
A graphic adaptation of a short story from Alarcón's debut, War by Candlelight (2005). Larceny, legacy, and Lima, Peru, with illustrations by Alvarado. Don Hugo was a thief and a cheat, and his sudden death pulls his estranged journalist son, Chino, back into the family's orbit for the first time in years—since Don Hugo abandoned Chino and his mother for a mistress. Chino takes the current close relationship between his mother and the mistress-turned-common-law wife and her sons, Chino's half brothers, as a humiliation. After crafting an obituary truncated in favor of his sweet mother, Chino chases a story on street-performing clowns, his research taking him into Lima's hustle and bustle even as dark ruminations on family and greasepaint take him straight to his true inheritance. Alarcón (At Night We Walk in Circles, 2013, etc.) paints a fascinating Lima teeming with whores, used-nail salesmen, class warfare, corrupt politicians and security guards, workers building houses only to rob them, marching shoeshine boys, and the ever looming clowns, whose garish appearances put them beyond society's recognition. The flat blacks and stark whites of Alvarado's art accentuate a noir atmosphere, one color slicing the other into crisp definition as in an etching. Alvarado's simple backgrounds, flat figures, and heavy outlines sometimes give characters a dioramic pop off the page, though the art rarely wows. The finest illustrations open sections with small, Edward Gorey-like figures depicting Lima's hoi polloi, the reduced scale enhancing Alvarado's linework through compaction. Some pages panel imaginatively—delivering narration of Don Hugo's construction work one word per brick—and the elegantly concise text takes to the graphic treatment nicely, breaking into bouncing boxes that easily tease the gaze along. This quick pacing helps to gloss over some illustrations' stiff figures and blunted affect. A swift, fatalistic love letter to Lima, with spirited if inconsistent art.

Kirkus Reviews