Sentence - Ten Years and a Thousand Books in Prison

A memoir of a decade in prison by a well-educated young addict known as the "Apologetic Bandit"

In 2003, fresh out of NYU, Daniel Genis was working in publishing as his writer father had always expected. But he was also hiding a serious heroin addiction that led him into debt and burglary. After he was arrested for robbing people at knifepoint in 2003, Daniel Genis was nicknamed the "apologetic bandit" in the press, given his habit of apologizing to his victims as he took their cash. He was sentenced to twelve years (ten with good behavior), surviving the decade by reading 1,046 books, weightlifting, having philosophical discussions with various inmates, encountering violence on a daily basis, working at a series of prison jobs, and in general observing an existence for which nothing in his life had prepared him.

Sentence is one of the most striking prison memoirs-and memoirs in general-in recent years-written with intelligence, wit, empathy, and remarkable style. Genis is the son of a famous Soviet émigré writer, broadcaster, and culture critic in Russia. He grew up in a home whose visitors included Mikhail Baryshnikov; Russian nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov; authors Kurt Vonnegut, Umberto Eco, and Norman Mailer; and Czech film director Miloš Forman. The education and culture so prized by his family were his lifeline during his decade in prison, and he describes in unsparing and vivid detail the realities of daily life in the New York penal system, from Rikers Island through a series of upstate institutions. He learns about the social strata of gangs, the "court" system that sets geographic boundaries in prison yards, how sex was obtained, the black market of drugs and more practical goods, the inventiveness required for everyday tasks such as cooking, and how debilitating solitary confinement actually is-all while trying to preserve his relationship with his recently married wife.

Daniel Genis's debut has the potential to be both a critical and popular success, for few books have portrayed prison so vividly or with such insight.

About the author

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.



 

Summary

A memoir of a decade in prison by a well-educated young addict known as the "Apologetic Bandit"

In 2003 Daniel Genis, the son of a famous Soviet émigré writer, broadcaster, and culture critic, was fresh out of NYU when he faced a serious heroin addiction that led him into debt and ultimately crime. After he was arrested for robbing people at knifepoint, he was nicknamed the “apologetic bandit” in the press, given his habit of expressing his regret to his victims as he took their cash. He was sentenced to twelve years—ten with good behavior, a decade he survived by reading 1,046 books, taking up weightlifting, having philosophical discussions with his fellow inmates, working at a series of prison jobs, and in general observing an existence for which nothing in his life had prepared him. 

Genis describes in unsparing and vivid detail the realities of daily life in the New York penal system. In his journey from Rikers Island and through a series of upstate institutions he encounters violence on an almost daily basis, while learning about the social strata of gangs, the “court” system that sets geographic boundaries in prison yards, how sex was obtained, the workings of the black market in drugs and more practical goods, the inventiveness required for everyday tasks such as cooking, and how debilitating solitary confinement actually is—all while trying to preserve his relationship with his recently married wife. 

 

Written with empathy and wit, Sentence is a strikingly powerful memoir of the brutalities of prison and how one man survived then, leaving its walls with this book inside him, “one made of pain and fear and laughter and lots of other books.”

Additional text

"A man does hard time with the help of literature in this striking and soulful debut. . . . By turns harrowing and mordantly funny, Genis’s account illuminates how the written word helps humanity endure in the stoniest soil."
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“[A] sharp, wry memoir. . . . The author’s voice is insightful, candid, and sometimes darkly humorous. A vivid portrait of endurance behind bars.”
—Kirkus Reviews

"Genis was condemned to 10 years confinement in America’s top security prisons for demanding money from shopkeepers to support his heroin habit. His instrument of persuasion was a dysfunctional penknife. Brilliant, sensitive, Russian and Jewish, he may have been America’s most erudite prisoner. His memoir is no attention-grabbing horror story, it is an incredibly detailed and mind-blowing record of a journey through hell. Like his hero Dostoevsky, he organizes his record by subject and tells us, without a single lurid adjective, exactly how it is in the House of the Dead."
—John Burdett, internationally bestselling author of the Bangkok 8 series

"In combining threads of immigration and incarceration, Daniel Genis has written a brave and uniquely American book."
—Gary Shteyngart, author of Our County Friends and Super Sad True Love Story

"Daniel Genis’s Sentence is an immensely engaging book, full of dark humor and stunning insights on being incarcerated, but it’s true power lies in the profound depiction of one man’s quest to understand what this country is all about and find his identity and place in the world." 
—Lara Vapnyar, New York Times bestselling author of Divide Me By Zero and other novels

Product details

• Authors: Daniel Genis
• Publisher: Viking USA
• Languages: English
• Age Recommendation: from age 18
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 22.02.2022
• EAN: 9780525429555
• ISBN: 978-0-525-42955-5
• No. of pages: 320
• Dimensions: 159 mm x 236 mm x 26 mm
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature > Letters, diaries; Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous; BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Criminals & Outlaws, LITERARY CRITICISM / General, Memoirs, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Memoirs