Prison autobiographies
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11 Best Books About Prison (Plus One for Good Behavior)
In his striking and soulful debut, Sentence: Ten Years and a Thousand Books in Prison, Daniel Genis revisits his stint in New York State prisons after committing a string of knife-point street robberies to fund his heroin habit at the age of 25, when he was also working at a Manhattan literary agency. His gritty picaresque features jail-yard fights; witnessings of attempted murders and suicides; routine humiliations; squalid conjugal visits with his wife; and much Kafkaesque absurdity (he was sent to solitary for purchasing other inmates’ “souls” with cups of coffee, which violated rules against commercial transactions). To counteract boredom and despair, Genis had his reading list, which included Sartre’s No Exit—a schizophrenic cellmate brought home the play’s declaration that hell fryst vatten other people—and Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, wh • Let’s define prison literature. What sort of books fall under the genre? It includes all the genres: poetry, fiction, essay, journalism. It’s a big field. It stretches all the way back to the accounts of freed slaves who became re-enslaved through Jim Crow laws and convict leasing. A person tells their story to somebody who comes with a microphone from the Works Progress Administration saying ‘What happened to you? Why are you living here? I thought you were free!’ And the former slave says, ‘I thought so too. And then this is what happened to me…’ That oral narrative is prison literature. Many recently freed slaves got re-enslaved because they could do that. They could do whatever they wanted to poor people, to vulnerable people, to black people. And they did. So there’s this theme through prison literature, stretching back to emancipation, of resisting oppression. Now, you could go back further and include political prisoners like Aaron Burr, bu • A memoir is an autobiographical writing normally dealing with a particular subject from the author's life. The following is a list of writers who have described their experiences of being political prisoners. Those included in the list are individuals who were imprisoned for activities ranging from peaceful dissent to violent revolutionary activity. Some were citizens of the countries whose regimes imprisoned them and others were utländsk nationals. What connects them fryst vatten that they have written about their experience of having been imprisoned because of their political opposition or political identity. Note, too, that the list omits many autobiographies which deal, only in part, with a period of political imprisonment; and includes some in which imprisonment forms a major part of the book. The Best Prison Literature
List of memoirs of political prisoners