87 books like The American Notes

After the news came out that Norman Mailer was writing a book about the life of Gary Gilmore, which came to be his magnum opus, The Executioner’s Song, he received a letter from a convict named Jack Henry Abbott. An avid reader of philosophy and literature who was also serving a life sentence, Abbott wrote to warn the renowned author against misapprehending American prisons and to teach him how to write about the violence of incarceration. The two men exchanged long, detailed letters. Eventually, Mailer collected Abbott’s letters in this book. In his letters, in a tone both detached and lyrical, Abbott writes unforgettably about what spending long years in prison does to one’s soul and body. In my view, the letter on solitary confinement is the finest and most harrowing chapter of this book.  

Those interested in the never-ending drama of US-Iranian relations since 1979 probably remember the affair of the mountain climbers. Three Americans, hiking the mountains in Iraqi Kurdistan, mistakenly crossed the border into Iran. They were taken to Evin prison in Tehran, where they were imprisoned for two years, a good part of which they spent in solitary confinement as Iran and the US used them as pawns in their complicated dance of diplomacy. After their release, the hikers wrote a memoir together. This is one of the best accounts of solitary confinement in Evin available in English.

The American carceral system is notorious for long, senseless solitary confinement sentences. While this is now public knowledge, we have actually heard very little from the people who have undergone such brutality. Hell Is A Very Small Place aims to give a platform to these people. This book is an invaluable collection of first-person accounts, composed by the people who lived this horror, many of them for unconscionably long periods. In their distinct voices, they articulate myriad ways time in solitary leads to the destruction of the human soul.  

My list would not be complete without a work of scholarship. Of the texts I encountered during my research, this one stayed with me. It helped me develop a deeper, more philosophical insight into solitary experience. This book begins in the early days of the penitentiary system in the US, analyzing the inmates' experiences through a phenomenological approach. It discusses sensory deprivation, the way the disorienting experience of time in solitary interferes with basic sensory perception, and what this type of confinement does to the human mind. The author shows that all the justifications about the redemptive, corrective or reformative potential of this form of punishment are weak attempts at concealing what it is: an effective tool for the annihilation of human subjectivity.

Before I read this book, I had only the vaguest idea of what happens in supermax prisons or even solitary confinement in regular prisons. In this book, Rhodes shares her observations of a maximum-security prison–really inside. She had incredible access to the guards, the cell blocks, and the prisoners.

I already knew that Rhodes is a brilliant anthropologist–I loved her book Emptying Beds: The Work of an Emergency Psychiatric Unit (the bit that has stayed in my mind is the practice of offering patients a one-way ticket to California to get these pesty mentally ill, homeless people out of the overcrowded Chicago unit).

This book is, in some ways, the next step in that story, but in some ways, the opposite. Where the emergency unit tried to get rid of patients, the supermax prison tried to hold onto them. I was especially fascinated by the detailed descriptions of interactions between… show more.

This is my all-time favourite book. I heard the author tell her story and her resilience over a zoom conference and I immediately knew that my life would never be the same. I didn’t know how but I knew I would be different.

Stolen Time is about a woman wrongly convicted for murder who spent 17 years incarcerated, five of those years were spent in solitary confinement on death row. Her partner was also sentenced and in fact executed two years before Sunny was exonerated. It's the beautiful way Sunny speaks that made this my all-time favourite read. It’s a love story with real tragedy but told in the most resilient and forgiving way. I found it totally inspiring. Sunny taught me that no matter what the circumstances we have a duty to love and forgive no matter what if we want to live free. No one can steal our… show more.

I think this book is very important because Soyinka shows that the right of the people to protest cannot be restricted by walls or chains. That the oppressor is totally helpless against the will of the people, as also shown in Taduno’s Song by the protagonist Taduno and Kongi, a character modelled on Soyinka. Imprisoned without trial by the authorities at the start of the Nigerian civil war, Wole Soyinka’s prison notes provide records of the twenty 27 months he spent in solitary confinement, the very basis of the words that would cement his place as a prisoner of conscience and give rise to a body of work that would illuminate the world.

If you, like me, believe in the universality and power of ordinary people’s lives, then this book is essential. LeBlanc spent 11 years reporting it, practically living with the people who would become its main characters and who she followed as they sold drugs, went to prison, got pregnant, committed murder, and went on with their lives.

The only downside to reading this as a fellow journalist is that it is so awe-inspiring as to be intimidating and makes you want to hang it up and do something else.

I love this book because it’s a classic and engaging sci-fi thriller with an original twist that kept me on my toes, a remarkable main character, and a compelling supporting cast. The dystopian element kept me hooked throughout, and the masterful storytelling often made me forget I was reading.

It is not only gripping but thought-provoking, with commentary on societal issues, much like YA dystopian novels from my childhood. What’s most frightening about this book is that it's easy to see that this sort of thing could happen today. 

Set during the 2005 bus-driver strikes in Iran, this book explores imprisonment at nearly every level—from the confinement of a totalitarian regime to the physical and psychological torture of a political prisoner, to the locked doors of one’s own mind, to the escape sought (and sometimes found) in heroine. What sticks with me most, however, is the interior exploration of the main character, Yunus, and the way seemingly small decisions lead to enormous consequences.