The Splendid City with Author Terence Clarke

Terence Clarke's new novel recounts Pablo Neruda's famous escape, for political reasons, from Chile to Argentina in the winter of 1949. Although a senator in the Chilean Congress, and already a world-renowned poet, he was being chased out of his own country because of his avowed Communism. On horseback, being led through the cordillera by local trackers, he almost died twice. The novel is an imaginative look at what that journey was like for him. It is being translated to Spanish by noted Chilean novelist Jaime Collyer.

Terence Clarke is the director of publishing at Astor & Lenox (www.astorandlenox.com). He is also a novelist (Mercury House, Ballantine Books), a short-story writer (The Yale Review, The Antioch Review,The Chariton Review, Tampa Review, Kindle Singles and many others), a journalist (San Francisco Chronicle, Salon.com, Huffington Post), and a translator of literature from Spanish to English. Among his favorite authors, he mentions Jane Austen, Frank O'Connor, and Eduardo Galeano. (His absolute favorite novel is Pride and Prejudice.) His novels include The Notorious Dream of Jesús Lázaro, My Father in the Night, The King of Rumah Nadai, and A Kiss for Señor Guevara.