Through the silent darkness of the prison night, there were at least five conversations soaring back and forth.'Īvi Steinberg was born in Jerusalem and grew up in Boston and Cleveland. I followed the invisible trajectory of these messages and found their recipients standing in barred windows way up in the Tower - the women inmates. While his friends are getting married and getting. A few years after graduating from Harvard, Avi Steinberg is stumped.

Jacobs’s The Year of Living Biblically, a hilarious immersion memoir of one lapsed Orthodox Jew’s stint as a prison librarian.

He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker’s Culture Desk blog. As I walked through the prison yard, I'd spied male inmates standing at their barred windows, furiously signaling skyward. Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian. Avi Steinberg is the author of Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian, which was a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year. 'Starting from my first week in prison, I'd noticed the phenomenon, though I wasn't sure what it was. The interviewee, Avi Steinberg, was speaking of his experience as a prison librarian and his subsequent memoir, Running the Books The Adventures of an. The stories Steinberg tells are a mixture of grit and whimsy the harsh realities of prison life rub up against the tragic and heartwarming, often in the same scenes. Adrift after graduating from Harvard and rejecting the demands of his Orthodox Jewish upbringing, Avi Steinberg stumbles into a job running the library in a. During his time there, he teaches creative writing classes, befriends inmates, starts feuds with corrections officers, and discovers countless 'kites' - messages between inmates hidden within the pages of library books. Running the Books is Avi Steinberg's memoir of his two years as a librarian at Boston's South Bay prison.

Running the Books by Avi Steinberg