Harmless, gentle souls locked up inside a jail ... - current New Yorker story

A very powerful and scary and all too credible story in current New Yorker,Daniel Alarcon's Collectors, set in unnamed Latin American country, follows two young men on their paths to the frightful eponymous prison where as cell mates they develop a friendship and then a sexual relationship - ultimately one gets out of prison one does not. Strength of the story is not only Alarcon's vivid depiction of the horrors of life in this prison, particularly as seen from the POV of one of the men entering for the first time and fearing for his life and suspecting he will never learn the unwritten rules. Greater strength is the subtle portrait of the two men, quite different characters - one the youngest of several sons, good with his hands, but completely illiterate, shy and quiet, ends up transporting bricks of Rx for his older brother, gets caught but won't squeal, sent off to prison - like so many "harmless, gentle souls locked up inside a jail" - the other a well-known playwright and director who is grabbed by government thugs after the performance of a play that criticizes the government, several days of interrogation and then off to Collectors - although he has strong family support and his arrest is big news, there's nothing anyone can do for him against the forces of a paranoid and tyrannical government. The crux of the story is his successful effort to get permission to stage his play, I think it's called The Idiot President, inside Collectors. Alarcon could have done a little more with this central performance - the tradition of prison performances is a strong a fruitful mode, at least in film - Titticut Follies, Grand Illusion - but here the play does not lead to a confrontation or recrimination, as I would have thought. I know nothing about Alarcon and his work, not even where he's from, though it appears this was written in English, but this is a thoughtful and promising story, certainly fulfilling two of the functions of great literature - bringing us access to the consciousness of another and news from elsewhere. Well, it could even be news from here.