About this item
In 2003 Daniel Genis, the son of a famous Soviet migr writer, broadcaster, and culture critic, was fresh out of NYU when he faced a serious heroin addiction that led him into debt and ultimately crime. After he was arrested for robbing people at knifepoint, he was nicknamed the "apologetic bandit" in the press, given his habit of expressing his regret to his victims as he took their cash. He was sentenced to twelve years - ten with good behavior, a decade he survived by reading 1,046 books, taking up weightlifting, having philosophical discussions with his fellow inmates, working at a series of prison jobs, and in general observing an existence for which nothing in his life had prepared him. Genis describes in unsparing and vivid detail the realities of daily life in the New York penal system.
About the Author
Daniel Genis is the son of Russian immigrants who came to the USA in 1977; he was born the following year. His father is Alexander Genis, a well-known Russian public intellectual and author. Daniel attended Stuyvesant high school and NYU, graduating in 1999. He began a career in publishing at the same time as selling blow and getting hooked on dope. He also read the entire corpus of writing from antiquity and was well into the Middle Ages when narcotics interfered. After a very desperate summer week in 2003, he was convicted of five counts of robbery and sent to prison for ten years. His time in Maximun Security as a New Yorker-reading smarty-pants and prison-yard weight lifter was good fodder for a journalistic career and the memoir SENTENCE; Ten Years & a Thousand Books in Prison. Today he's been free and clean since his release in 2014 and lives with his wife Petra Szabo in Brooklyn, NY.
