Riots I Have Known

An Amazon Best Book of May 2019:Riots I Have Known is a spitfire of a novel: funny, abrasive, and intelligent. As a prison riot thunders in the background, an inmate narrates the action from the Will and Edith Rosenberg Media Center for Journalistic Excellence in the Penal Arts. For several years, the inmate has reported the facts of prison life in the literary journal The Holding Pen (a stunt led by the PR-savvy warden), which has garnered a national following. In the journal, he regales readers with the disquieting and daily events inside a prison, while meandering through bourgeoisie meditations on art, culture, religion—and there is no way you won’t laugh out loud. Like Proust and Knausgaard, his unflinching pledge to narrate his own thoughts is virtuous, ruthless, comical and addictive, and grows even more poignant as the mob closes in on the media center. Ryan Chapman is a gifted wordsmith, and his debut, which whips by, is intensely satisfying. —Al Woodworth