Books Behind Bars: The Best Prison Literature

20,000 Years in Sing Sing by Lewis E. Lawes, Call it the Slammer, the Big House, the Pokey or the Clink, prison remains a place no-one wishes to go but everyone wants to read about. The vast majority of people will never step inside one but everyone can imagine what jailbird life must be like. Authors, both fiction and non-fiction writers, have considered almost every aspect of imprisonment – the solitude of a life sentence, the culture and the contraband, the escapes, the torture, the miscarriages of justice and the innocent souls, the warders, the political and war-time prison camps, and the letters and visits.  Even the slang, the tattoos and the last meals of those on Death Row have been documented.Countless books, from The Count of Monte Cristo to Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun, have touched upon prison life but our selection of 25 books highlights novels and real-life accounts where doing time is at the absolute heart of the story.

Fictional Prison Literature

Invitation to a Beheading

Vladimir Nabokov

Bookseller: The Book Depository US

(Gloucester, ., United Kingdom)

Quantity Available: 1

ISBN: 9781480543027

Book Description: Brilliance Corporation, United States, 2013. CD-Audio. Book Condition: New. Unabridged. 188 x 137 mm. Brand New. Like Kafka s The Castle, Invitation to a Beheading embodies a vision of a bizarre and irrational world. In an unnamed dream country, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for gnostical turpitude,  an imaginary crime that defies definition. Cincinnatus spends his last days in an absurd jail, where he is visited by chimerical jailers, an executioner who masquerades as a fellow prisoner, and by his in-laws, who lug their furniture with them into his cell. When Cincinnatus is led out to be executed, he simply wills his executioners out of existence; they disappear, along with the whole world they inhabit.