Posted by Nat Bernstein
I was so taken with the content of Steven Shankman’s Turned Inside Out: Reading the Russian Novel in Prison I almost failed to notice the book cover, which certainly stands on its own:
Put Fyodor Dostoevsky, Vasily Grossman, and Emmanuel Levinas together in one sentence and I’m already hooked, but Shankman’s story is even more intriguing and important than a discussion of those three oeuvres: it’s an account of holding that discussion between university campuses and prison classrooms in the United States. Turned Inside Out promises to be a worthy successor to Andrew D. Kaufman’s Give War and Peace a Chance: Tolstoyan Wisdom for Our Troubled Times and Avi Steinberg’s stunning debut memoir, Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian, and the artwork on this book cover is perfection: a graphic blend of literal and abstract representation of the story that strikes the appealing balance of spare clutter, painted in just the right colors.
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Nat Bernstein is the former Manager of Digital Content & Media, JBC Network Coordinator, and Contributing Editor at the Jewish Book Council and a graduate of Hampshire College.