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[Alarcón continues]... those blowhards who write the Left Behind books will win the Presidency and usher in his longed-for dream of a sexless, pleasure-free Christian autocracy. Of course we'll all be in jail long before this happens.

LRS: If we do all get thrown in the clink, what are some of the short story collections you'd most like to have in your cell?

Alarcón: There are a bunch. I reread Drown by Junot Diaz almost every year. Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson. Recently I loved Natasha by David Bezmozgis, and Lucky Girls by Nell Freudenberger. Lost in the City, the Edward P. Jones collection was pretty sweet, as was The Question of Bruno by Aleksandar Hemon.

There are other writers I come back to again and again, always and forever: Borges, Julio Cortázar, Cheever, Isaac Babel, Julio Ramón Ribeyro, Juan Rulfo, Bruno Schulz, and of course, Carson McCullers 'cause I'm always repping the South.

LRS: Interesting. Who is this Julio Ramón Ribeyro person?

Alarcón: You know, every country has these seminal writers whose significance is for whatever reason confined to the national borders. Ribeyro is one of these, an important, touchstone writer within the Peruvian canon, certainly respected in the Spanish-speaking world, but not read much outside of that. José María Arguedas is another. Both have been translated, but neither has transcended, really.

Ribeyro is best known as a short story writer. He's your classic post-Boom Latin American realist, an unapologetically bleak chronicler of urban decay, who writes these beautiful, heart-breaking stories about Lima, its various underworlds, its class and racial tensions, manhood, drinking, violence, both real and metaphorical—all that good shit. He published all his stories with one title, La Palabra del Mudo (The Voice of the Voiceless, roughly, though it sounds fresher in Spanish), which he kept revising and adding to. Unbelievable stuff.

And then you have Arguedas. This guy is off the hook. For Peruvians, he's probably as important as Vargas Llosa, in some ways more so. He embodies all of our frighteningly confused identity issues. He was a white criollo whose father worked as an itinerant lawyer, leaving Arguedas to be raised by his uncle, a cruel landowner who sent his nephew to live with the servants. So Arguedas learns Quechua, the indigenous Andean language, before he learns Spanish, and really identifies with the indigenous community. Eventually he travels to Lima, studies anthropology, and dedicates himself to writing fiction in the voice of the indigenous people who brought him up. He writes this series of autobiographical novels (Los Ríos Profundos, Todas las Sangres), classic joints that deal with the issues and customs and injustices of Andean life. All this culminates in what, for my taste, is his finest, most experimental book, The Fox from Above, the Fox from Below, which is a novel, an essay on Latin American literature (and his beef with Cortázar), and also a suicide note addressed to his editor. It's his first novel set in a coastal city, a place peopled by Andean migrants, American Peace Corps volunteers, criollos, blacks, everyone—in this sense it's a departure for him. The novel part doesn't finish; Arguedas sort of trails off, describes how it might have continued if he'd had the strength to finish it, apologizes to his editor, puts the manuscript in the mail, and kills himself.

Even without the dramatic, real-life story of a man battling depression and identity, and losing, it's a hell of a book. With that layer on top, damn—it's so harrowing, it's almost overwhelming. His struggle for a sense of self is a mirror to the Peruvian struggle. We haven't made any peace at all with the question of how to deal with the indigenous issue. Arguedas's widow later became a member of the Shining Path and was killed in a prison riot during the war.

LRS: Wow. Well, lastly, on a somewhat different note—and hopefully without getting too personal—I'd like to ask about a difficult issue I know you've been wrestling with in your own private life. Up until sometime last year you were a devoted fan of the New York Yankees, but this is no longer the case. Can you tell us briefly how this change came about? Do you think the shift has anything to do with your writing, or will impact your work in a significant way?

Alarcón: My uncle Alfredo once told me that you can trust a man who changes his politics, a man who changes his woman, but a man who changes his team affiliation is completely suspect. So yes, this is a bit of a sensitive subject for me, because I tend to think of my tío as usually speaking truth. Let's see: I became a Yankees fan in 1996 (like a lot of people who were living in New York at the time) but only because I bet my father (who was living in Atlanta) that the Yanks would beat the Braves in the World Series. This would seem to be the most abject bandwagoneering ever, but in my defense, I made this $50 bet after the Yankees had dropped the first two games at home. I could pull up stats as to why this was a foolish wager on my part, but I won't. The point is that we went on to win that year, and then again in 1998, 1999, and 2000. I loved those Yankees teams: Paul O'Neill, Bernie Williams, Chuck Knoblauch with all his wonderful and tragic I-can-no-longer-throw-to-first-base angst. And you can't hate on Jeter, dude is a winner.

So why the change of heart? The Alex Rodriguez trade is what made me turn in my pinstripes. That and the Aaron Boone homer against the BoSox in 2003. I watched that game with you, Vinnie. Do you remember the face Peter Bognanni made when it went over the wall? He looked like the sole survivor of some horrible accident. If ever there was anything generous still left in my cold, cold heart, it was stirred in that moment. I just couldn't justify cheering for the over-dog anymore. Then came the A-Rod fiasco that winter: the richest team in the league would get the most expensive, most talented player of his generation? Ach. I couldn't take it. They're doing fine without me anyway. They'll always make the playoffs. The Oakland A's are my team now. I live two train stops from the Coliseum. Barry Zito has nasty stuff. And I like the colors—yellow and green, just like the UAB Blazers, the team I grew up cheering for.

None of this has affected my writing in any perceptible way.