Malcolm Braly Bücher

FALSE STARTS <em>"It seemed clear to me I had always known I was going to jail. When I had bolted Redding to try to join the Navy, I had known. When I had told Percy, "We'll be back," I had known. When I had followed George into the all-night diner, I had known. I had served more time for a handful of inept burglaries than most men would have served for killing a police officer, and the prison was only my chosen instrument in the willful destruction of my own life."</em> Malcolm Braly spent the better part of his life behind bars. Arrested for a botched teenage burglary, he made one mistake after another, always returning to the institution that turned a sensitive young man into a hardened con. This is his story, an indictment of both his own failings and those of a system that seeks to reform those weaknesses, but instead only reinforces them. From foster child to delinquent to armed robber to escaped convict, we follow Braly as he chases after his freedom--continually confronted by his own self-destructive actions--before turning to the outlet of writing that allowed him to succeed.

A major American novel, and arguably the finest work of literature ever to emerge from a US prison, On the Yard is a book of penetrating psychological realism in which Malcolm Braly paints an unforgettable picture of the complex and frightening world of the penitentiary. At its center are the violently intertwined stories of Chilly Willy, in trouble with the law from his earliest years and now the head of the prison's flourishing black market in drugs and sex, and of Paul, wracked with guilt for the murder of his wife and desperate for some kind of redemption. At once brutal and tender, clear-eyed and rueful, On the Yard presents the penitentiary not as an exotic location, an exception to everyday reality, but as an ordinary place, one every reader will recognize, American to the core.