{"id":2071,"date":"2014-07-09T15:39:16","date_gmt":"2014-07-09T15:39:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/?p=2071"},"modified":"2014-07-09T15:39:16","modified_gmt":"2014-07-09T15:39:16","slug":"a-prisoners-reading-list","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/a-prisoners-reading-list","title":{"rendered":"A PRISONER\u2019S READING LIST"},"content":{"rendered":"

JULY 8, 2014<\/span>
\nPOSTED BY ALEX HALBERSTADT<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I met Daniel Genis at a bookstore. It was March, and I was there to speak on a panel about Sergei Dovlatov, the comic novelist of late Soviet decay, and Genis came up to me afterward, wanting to talk about books. Books, it became clear, were something he knew about. Genis talks quickly and often, and his pale, insinuating eyes make him look like he\u2019s in on a really stupendous secret. On that night, he wore a T-shirt pulled snugly over a substantial belly and an ill-fitting blazer. He had a good reason to be at the bookstore: his father is Alexander Genis, a collaborator of Dovlatov\u2019s who happens to be one of the best-known nonfiction writers working in Russian; a collection of his essays is currently on Russia\u2019s best-seller list. The younger Genis and I talked. It came out that our parents knew each other slightly, and we had gone to the same high school, and after a while I wondered out loud why we hadn\u2019t met. The reason, he confided, was that some weeks earlier he had been released from prison, where he spent ten years and three months after pleading guilty to five charges of armed robbery. He also remarked, offhandedly, that his authentic education as a reader began not while he was a history major at N.Y.U. or working at a literary agency in Manhattan but at the Green Haven Correctional Facility, in Stormville, New York. There, he offered, he had read a thousand and forty-six books.<\/p>\n

We stayed in touch, and, in the course of several dinners and many bottles of sulfurous mineral water from Brighton Beach, Genis filled in more details. He grew up in Washington Heights, in an apartment that, in the eighties and early nineties, doubled as a clubhouse for hard-drinking Soviet \u00e9migr\u00e9 writers and artists. His father\u2014a cultural critic, essayist, and radio host whose place in Russian letters can be suggested by some unlikely melding of Bernard-Henri L\u00e9vy and Bill Bryson\u2014presided over the steady flow of guests and vodka. With Dovlatov and the journalist Petr Vail, Alexander Genis edited the influential Russian-language weekly \u201cThe New American.\u201d At the apartment on Ellwood Street, the men cooked and discussed art and politics and downed many toasts, and it often fell to the women\u2014usually Genis\u2019s wife, Irina, who worked for Pan Am\u2014to clean up after them. Some visitors imbibed so heavily that the following morning they woke in the tub; a plastered Dovlatov once presented a five-year-old Daniel Genis with an air pistol. Genis fils sported a suit and earned allowance from his father in exchange for completing difficult books and translations in Russian. \u201cAs a young child, I was treated like a miniature adult,\u201d he told me. \u201cAnd I learned from an early age that as long as you were talented and artistically successful, your every transgression was forgiven.\u201d
\nhttp:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/online\/blogs\/books\/2014\/07\/a-prisoners-reading-list.html<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

JULY 8, 2014 POSTED BY ALEX HALBERSTADT … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[107],"tags":[578,579],"views":863,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2071"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2071"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2071\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2073,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2071\/revisions\/2073"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}