Eleven of the best books about prison

Daniel Genis was born in New York City and graduated from NYU with degrees in history and French. He has worked as a translator and has written for Newsweek, The Daily Beast, The Paris Review, The Washington Post, Vice, Deadspin, Süddeutsche Zeitung, The Guardian, and the New York Daily News.

His new memoir is Sentence: Ten Years and a Thousand Books in Prison.

At Publishers Weekly Genis shared a list of eleven "standout books about prison—which could easily have been twice as long—and you will have a good idea of the nature of incarceration." One title on the list:

A Man in Full by Tom Wolfe

This 1998 novel only has about 120 pages set inside prison, but boy are they on point! I would have loved to have asked Tom Wolfe how he knew? How did he get the sights and sounds so right, and most of all the fear? Prison wears away at your soul and takes years off your life by keeping you in an unnatural state, afraid from the moment you get up until the cell door closes, and even then the fear follows you into your nightmares. In this novel, the hero is terrified of being raped and just when it looks like there can be no reprieve, Tom Wolfe allows such a deus ex machina that its very placement is tongue in cheek. An earthquake brings down the prison walls and allows our protagonist to escape his fate in all senses. Never have the walls of Jericho fallen with such good timing.

This is a very good novel to read about prison because it also deals heavily with Epictetus and the Stoic philosophy. This is what allows a man to suffer, especially when things are not going to get better, maybe not for a while, maybe never. I knew that situation well, and somehow, despite being a literary celebrity, so did Tom Wolfe!

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue