Prison Noir (Hardcover)

This anthology presents an absolutely new perspective on prison literature. Some prisoners are encouraged to write, but few are encouraged to write crime fiction set behind bars (in some institutions, that subject matter is prohibited). Joyce Carol Oates has done an outstanding job of curating a top-notch collection of stories that bring the reader truly behind the "scenes" of prison life.

As Oates writes in her introduction to the volume, ""The blood jet is poetry"--these words of Sylvia Plath have reverberated through my experience of reading and rereading the stories of "Prison Noir." In this case the blood jet is prose, though sometimes poetic prose; if we go a little deeper, in some chilling instances, the blood jet is exactly that: "blood." . . . There is no need for fantasy-horror in a place in which matter-of-fact horror is the norm, and mental illness is epidemic. Vividly rendered realism is the predominant literary strategy, as in a riveting documentary film."

Features brand-new stories by Christopher M. Stephen, Sin Soracco, Scott Gutches, Eric Boyd, Ali F. Sareini, Stephen Geez, B.M. Dolarman, Zeke Caligiuri, Marco Verdoni, Kenneth R. Brydon, Linda Michelle Marquardt, Andre White, Timothy Pauley, Bryan K. Palmer, and William Van Poyck.

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, and the National Book Award. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers "We Were the Mulvaneys," "Blonde," and "The Falls." She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, and is the editor of "New Jersey Noir."