On Air with Alarcón

Welcome to Radio Ambulante from Radio Ambulante on Vimeo.

Daniel Alarcón, author of Rights Readers selection Lost City Radio, has a new project, Radio Ambulante, an audio/podcast series that's a kind of This American Life for Spanish speakers. The goal of the program is to create a community of storytellers and listeners from around Latin America and the United States. The program is the first of its kind in Spanish. Of course, Peruvian radio figures in the plot of Lost City, but Alarcón explained his longtime affinity for radio to KPCC, 

Daniel Alarcón grew up in Alabama. "We had to speak Spanish at home, in the house, and my father heard my sisters speaking English with a Southern twang and was sort of horrified," he said. "And then we started listening to NPR."

But Daniel's connection to radio came years before that--from his father. "His first job as a kid was as an announcer, calling soccer games in Arequipa, Peru," said Alarcón. "My sisters and I would gather on Sunday mornings in our parents bedroom and we would do these basically, now I think of them as radio programs, recorded onto cassettes where my dad would interview us and my mom would ask us what we've been doing in school and we would record our answers and we would mail them to Lima and our cousins in Lima would do the same thing."

Alarcón spoke recently at the Los Angeles Public Library and shared some of the program's first stories. You can listen to the presentation here. Don't worry if your Spanish is weak, enough of the program is in English to be enjoyable and it's not surprising to learn that Spanish language teachers have already latched onto the pedagogic potential of these stories. 

Rights Readers Round-up

Just a few loose ends to round-up regarding some of our favorite Rights Readers authors:

Elena Kudimova, discusses a new collection of essays by her late sister, Anna Politkovskaya, Is Journalism Worth Dying For?: Final Dispatches on WNYC.



Get a taste of Reza Aslan's (No God But God) new program on KCET-- Globalwatch.  Tell me what you think!

Daniel Alarcon (Lost City Radio) reads and discusses a Roberto Bolaño (Amulet) short story for the New Yorker. 


BBC World Book Club has a great interview and discussion with Jo Nesbø about his novel Redbreast.

The Empty Chair

This Human Rights Day we pause to honor Peace Laureate Liu Xiaobo by acknowledging the empty chair at the Nobel ceremonies. Amnesty International urges you to take action:

Nobel Peace Prize recipient Liu Xiaobo was charged with "inciting subversion of state power" and given an 11-year prison sentence on December 25, 2009 simply for co-authoring a proposal for political and legal reform in China. On October 7, the Beijing Municipal Higher People's Court upheld Liu Xiaobo's prison sentence. Urge Chinese authorities to release Liu Xiaobo immediately and unconditionally.

And we urge you to slip in a reference to Group 22 Pasadena's Chinese prisoner of conscience case Gao Zhisheng too. Check out the Globe and Mail's profiles of a courageous "Gang of 10" dissidents to watch, including Gao. To learn more about Liu Xiaobo, visit PEN's resource page.  You might also want to check out PEN President Kwame Anthony Appiah's piece on Liu in Foreign Policy: China's Burden of Shame which also mentions Gao. The NYT offers a Liu poem today.

Rights Readers authors have commented on Liu Xiaobo's plight and it's implications for the future of Chinese democracy.  Here's Orville Schell (Mandate Of Heaven) on PBS Newshour.  And Ma Jian (The Noodle Maker) writes in the Scotsman,

Though now better off than they have ever been in material terms, the Chinese people are denied any real opportunity to retain and refine their own dignity beyond the quest for wealth and luxury goods.   Liu's prize is a rebuke to the regime, because it rejects the dogma that nothing but the pursuit of economic interest matters.

We wouldn't want to overlook the Nobel Literature Laureate, Mario Vargas Llosa.  Many years we enjoyed reading Death in the Andes.  Rights Readers author Daniel Alarcon (Lost City Radio) reacts to the news of his award on WNYC and offers up a bit of fan worship in the Paris Review.  Vargas-Llosa's Nobel speech is well worth the read for this thoughts on reading, exile, and human rights, not missing the chance to acknowledge the empty chair himself,

...a dictatorship represents absolute evil for a country, a source of brutality and corruption and profound wounds that take a long time to close, poison the nation’s future, and create pernicious habits and practices that endure for generations and delay democratic reconstruction. This is why dictatorships must be fought without hesitation, with all the means at our disposal, including economic sanctions. It is regrettable that democratic governments, instead of setting an example by making common cause with those, like the Damas de Blanco in Cuba, the Venezuelan opposition, or Aung San Suu Kyi and Liu Xiaobo, who courageously confront the dictatorships they endure, often show themselves complaisant not with them but with their tormenters. Those valiant people, struggling for their freedom, are also struggling for ours.

Rights Readers Round-up

Just catching up on some of our Rights Readers authors:

Excellent interview with Mohsin Hamid (The Reluctant Fundamentalist) on the BBC World Book Club.

Daniel Alarcon (Lost City Radio) discusses editing a collection of short stories by Latin American writers with the The New Yorker. Names to watch for?

Arundhati Roy (The Cost of Living) on the crisis in Sri Lanka. Follow the latest on Sri Lanka on AIUSA's Human Rights Now blog.

Going back a couple months on this one, but here's a New Yorker podcast on the Politkovskaya (Putin's Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy) trial. Amnesty insight here.

Tribute to Reinaldo Arenas (Before Night Falls) at PEN World Voices. Francisco Goldman (The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop?) participated in a panel too.

Spring Cleaning

Lately I've accumulated a backlog of links which I should have blogged in a timely fashion so that you would have learned that Michael Ignatieff (Rights Readers selection Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond) is now the leader of Canada's Liberal Party -- and just now has taken the opportunity of his meeting with President Obama to discuss the case of Guantanamo juvenile detainee Omar Khadr.

Or you would know that Samantha Power (A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide) has taken a position with the NSC, but before she stepped up to serve she wrote yet another profile of a human rights defender for the New Yorker (and oh yeah here's a short version of the one she wrote a whole book about.)

And then there's Arundhati Roy's (The Cost of Living) response to the Mumbai attacks, the fact that Jon Burge (a central figure in John Conroy's Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture) was arrested last fall, and Daniel Alarcon (Lost City Radio) had a New Yorker short story with a provocative title published in October.

Fortunately, this American Scholar article about Chinese censorship by Ha Jin (Ocean of Words Army Stories and The Crazed) is the sort of thing that doesn't date that fast and a little item in my local paper-- "Last month a bipartisan group of six members of Congress nominated Greg Mortenson [Three Cups of Tea] for the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize"-- might still make a you-heard-it-here-first list.

Phew! That felt good! Perhaps we'll do that again sometime, sooner rather than later.

Our June Author: Daniel Alarcon

Our June author, Daniel Alarcon, has made my job easy this month with his own website. Check out the links page for interviews, readings and short stories.

From The Elegant Variation, we learn about the imagined setting for Lost City Radio,

When I was on tour last, for War by Candlelight, I always found myself saying, “If Peru was an invented country, and Lima an invented city, many people would still recognize it,” and I guess I sort of followed my own advice. I invented a country, a city, drew upon my experiences in Lima, upon my travels in West Africa, upon texts I read about Chechnya (the incomparable Anna Politkovskaya, RIP), or Beirut, or Mumbai.

Also, be sure to check out that interview for the author's experiences in Peru with a family looking for the disappeared.

From the LA Weekly, we learn more about the real life inspiration for the book,

Alarcón began collecting material during a trip to Lima in 1999 to research the life of his uncle Javier, a leftist professor who was “disappeared” 10 years earlier during the violent Shining Path guerrilla war that over two decades claimed 69,000 lives. His uncle’s life is the basis for the character Rey, a university botanist who ventures into the jungle and gradually becomes involved in a guerrilla movement. During his time in Lima, Alarcón was an avid fan of a radio show called Buscapersonas, or “People Finder.”

The weekly also has much about the Alarcon's complex identity, as do these essays in Washington Post and Salon.

For June: Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcon

For June we have selected Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcon,

For ten years, Norma has been the on-air voice of consolation and hope for the Indians in the mountains and the poor from the barrios—a people broken by war's violence. As the host of Lost City Radio, she reads the names of those who have disappeared—those whom the furiously expanding city has swallowed. Through her efforts lovers are reunited and the lost are found. But in the aftermath of the decadelong bloody civil conflict, her own life is about to forever change—thanks to the arrival of a young boy from the jungle who provides a cryptic clue to the fate of Norma's vanished husband.

Daniel Alarcon's debut story collection, War by Candlelight, was a finalist for the 2006 PEN/Hemingway Award. He has received a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and has been named by Granta magazine one of the Best American Novelists under thirty-five. He is the associate editor of Etiqueta Negra, an award-winning monthly magazine published in his native Lima, Peru. He lives in Oakland, California.