Listen free for 30 days

Listen with offer

Preview
  • Sentence

  • Ten Years and a Thousand Books in Prison
  • By: Daniel Genis
  • Narrated by: Daniel Genis
  • Length: 13 hrs and 36 mins

£0.00 for first 30 days

Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Sentence

By: Daniel Genis
Narrated by: Daniel Genis
Try for £0.00

£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

Pay using card ending in
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.

Summary

A memoir of a decade in prison by a well-educated young addict known as the "Apologetic Bandit".

In 2003, fresh out of NYU, Daniel Genis was working in publishing as his writer father had always expected. But he was also hiding a serious heroin addiction that led him into debt and burglary. After he was arrested for robbing people at knifepoint in 2003, Daniel Genis was nicknamed the "apologetic bandit" in the press, given his habit of apologizing to his victims as he took their cash. He was sentenced to 12 years (10 with good behavior), surviving the decade by reading 1,046 books, weightlifting, having philosophical discussions with various inmates, encountering violence on a daily basis, working at a series of prison jobs, and in general observing an existence for which nothing in his life had prepared him.

Sentence is one of the most striking prison memoirs - and memoirs in general - in recent years - written with intelligence, wit, empathy, and remarkable style. Genis is the son of a famous Soviet émigré writer, broadcaster, and culture critic in Russia. He grew up in a home whose visitors included Mikhail Baryshnikov; Russian nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov; authors Kurt Vonnegut, Umberto Eco, and Norman Mailer; and Czech film director Miloš Forman. The education and culture so prized by his family were his lifeline during his decade in prison, and he describes in unsparing and vivid detail the realities of daily life in the New York penal system, from Rikers Island through a series of upstate institutions. He learns about the social strata of gangs, the "court" system that sets geographic boundaries in prison yards, how sex was obtained, the black market of drugs and more practical goods, the inventiveness required for everyday tasks such as cooking, and how debilitating solitary confinement actually is - all while trying to preserve his relationship with his recently married wife.

Daniel Genis' debut has the potential to be both a critical and popular success, for few books have portrayed prison so vividly or with such insight.

©2022 Daniel Genis (P)2022 Penguin Audio
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2

Listeners also enjoyed...

No Human Contact cover art
The Change Agent cover art
Blood in the Soil cover art
Prison Days: Meeting Monsters cover art
My Time Will Come cover art
Marked for Life cover art
Becoming Ms. Burton cover art
Australia's Most Murderous Prison cover art
One Day cover art
The Toughest Prison of All cover art
Halfway Home cover art
Doing Time Like a Spy cover art
Our Class cover art
Inside Parkhurst - The Final Stretch cover art
The Road to London Bridge cover art
Special Agent cover art

Critic reviews

"An enjoyably pungent read from the outset. . . . Genis is a splendidly wry and enjoyable tour guide to hell in his capacity as prisoner 04A3328. . . . There is much dark humor, sometimes painfully so, from the disparity between the high-minded intellectualism that the author espouses—Proust, Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn are not so much namechecked as wielded—and the scatological grimness of the environment depicted herein. Genis has an affinity for the knotty phrase. . . . His stated intent—to educate his reader as to the insanity and inhumanity of the contemporary American penal experience—is fulfilled admirably over the course of Sentence. . . . Genis has the comic skill of early Woody Allen at describing the indignities and challenges that he, an educated upper-middle-class Jewish man, faced inside, and there are endless throwaway details that provoke wild laughter. . . . Going by the stories within this angrily hilarious book, the United States penal system has a phenomenal amount to answer for."
—Alexander Larman, Spectator World

"Combine the clean prose of Hemingway, the urban drug tales of William S. Burroughs, and sensibilities of the New York Review of Books and you have a good idea of what you’ll get from Sentence. . . . This fresh angle gives the book real momentum and a kinetic energy. Mr. Genis is also very funny."
The New York Sun

"A man does hard time with the help of literature in this striking and soulful debut. . . . By turns harrowing and mordantly funny, Genis’s account illuminates how the written word helps humanity endure in the stoniest soil."
Publishers Weekly (starred review)

What listeners say about Sentence

Average customer ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.