Three-and-a-half steps.
Visualize it: that’s how big your home is. Back against the wall, three-and-a-half steps until you can’t go anymore. Arms straight out at your sides, fingers touching both walls, cement floors. Hardly a palace.
Now you head outside any time you want, day or night, to do what you want to do. But picture bars on your doors and someone telling you when to eat and when to sleep. Then grab the new book “Prison Noir,” edited by Joyce Carol Oates, and read other tales of doing time.
Imagine the difficulty of choosing the best 15 of 100 exceptional prison stories, a challenge that faced author-editor Joyce Carol Oates in pulling this book together. That the entries she read were “well-crafted” should be no surprise; after all, each of them was written by someone who is or has been in prison, which lends a “disconcerting ring of authenticity” to tales like these.
You know if you’ve been incarcerated, for instance, that having cellies can be a thorny issue, but in the first story, “Shuffle” by Christopher M. Stephen, even segregation doesn’t mean “true solitary confinement” anymore.
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