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A riveting account of the two years literary scholar Mikita Brottman spent reading literature with criminals in a maximum-security men's prison outside Baltimore, and what she learned from them - Orange Is the New Black meets Reading Lolita in Tehran.On sabbatical from teaching literature to undergraduates, and wanting to educate a different kind of student, Mikita Brottman starts a book club with a group of convicts from the Jessup Correctional Institution in Maryland. She assigns them ten dark, challenging classics - including Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Shakespeare's Macbeth, Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Poe's story "The Black Cat," and Nabokov's Lolita - books that don't flinch from evoking the isolation of the human struggle, the pain of conflict, and the cost of transgression. Although Brottman is already familiar with these works, the convicts open them up in completely new ways. Their discussions may "only" be about literature, but for the prisoners, everything is at stake.Gradually, the inmates open up about their lives and families, their disastrous choices, their guilt and loss. Brottman also discovers that life in prison, while monotonous, is never without incident. The book club members struggle with their assigned reading through solitary confinement; on lockdown; in between factory shifts; in the hospital; and in the middle of the chaos of blasting televisions, incessant chatter, and the constant banging of metal doors.Though The Maximum Security Book Club never loses sight of the moral issues raised in the selected reading, it refuses to back away from the unexpected insights offered by the company of these complex, difficult men. It is a compelling, thoughtful analysis of literature - and prison life - like nothing you've ever read before.
About the Author
Mikita Brottman (born 30 October 1966) is a British scholar, psychoanalyst, author and cultural critic known for her psychological readings of the dark and pathological elements of contemporary culture. She received a D.Phil in English Language and Literature from Oxford University, was a Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University, and was Chair of the program in Engaged Humanities with an emphasis in Depth Psychology at the Pacifica Graduate Institute from 2008 to 2010. She currently teaches at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Brottman's articles and case studies have appeared in , New Literary History, and American Imago. She has written influentially on horror films, critical theory, reading, psychoanalysis, and the work of the American folklorist, Gershon Legman. Brottman also writes for mainstream and counterculture journals and magazines. Her work has appeared in such diverse venues as , and , where her column, "Sub Rosa", ran from January 2007 to July 2009. Her essays have also appeared in a number of books and anthologies. She is the author of the cult film books and , as well as books on psychoanalysis, critical theory and contemporary popular culture. Her most recent book, (Counterpoint, 2008) was selected as one of the Best Books of 2008 by Publishers Weekly, who said: "Sharp, whimsical and impassioned, Brottman's look at the pleasures and perils of compulsive reading is itself compulsively readable and will connect with any book lover. " Brottman's partner is the film critic David Sterritt. (from Wikipedia)
