I'm a sucker for any band named after a work of literature. Los de Abajo take their name from Mariano Azuela's famous novel 'The Underdogs,' and that says a lot about who they are and the music they make.

The impact of any particular writer on your own work is hard to discern.

I love the novel because it's like a love affair. You can just fall into it and keep going, and you never know where it's going to take you.

I began visiting Lima's prisons back in 2007, when my first novel, 'Lost City Radio,' was published in Peru.

I think I'm an American writer writing about Latin America, and I'm a Latin American writer who happens to write in English.

Writing a novel is not at all like riding a bike. Writing a novel is like having to redesign a bike, based on laws of physics that you don't understand, in a new universe. So having written one novel does nothing for you when you have to write the second one.