This book is a collection of the work read aloud by the Wednesday Night Creative Writing Class, or "Brothers in Pen," at San Quentin State Prison on July 13, 2013. Each writer selected a five-minute excerpt to read to an audience gathered for this annual public event. As always, the stories were compelling, intense, funny and challenging and the day reverberated for a long time after it was through. This book is a keepsake of that day and a way of sharing a taste of the work being done in this class. (For an experience of full-length stories from these writers, check out the anthologies available at brothersinpen.wordpress.com.)

Once a year the San Quentin Wednesday Night Creative Writing Class, a.k.a. Brothers in Pen, holds an Annual Public Reading where an outside audience is invited in, along with other men in blue, to listen to five-minute pieces crafted by the writers especially for this event. For weeks in advance, the writing and revision process is underway, and the authors also push each other to improve in the particular skill of reading a story aloud. This book represents the product of that labor in an event which took place in the ARC building on the lower yard of San Quentin State Prison on November 15, 2014. It was the ninth such event in the history of this particular class. The stories in their written form have a different kind of life than they do when read aloud by thier authors, but are no less worthwhile.

Brothers in Pen is the collective name of the writers in an ongoing creative writing workshop at San Quentin State Prison. This book contains selections of fiction in many genres, memoir, creative non-fiction, and some mutant hybrids... the common denominator being story. This is the ninth anthology produced by this class; as with Scheherazade of the Arabian Nights, the stories keep coming and keep enthralling. Ursula Le Guin said, "As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul." The Brothers in Pen invite you to participate in this book.

Jamaica Kincaid's brother Devon Drew died of AIDS on January 19, 1996, at the age of thirty-three. Kincaid's incantatory, poetic, and often shockingly frank recounting of her brother's life and death is also a story of her family on the island of Antigua, a constellation centered on the powerful, sometimes threatening figure of the writer's mother. My Brother is an unblinking record of a life that ended too early, and it speaks volumes about the difficult truths at the heart of all families. My Brother is a 1997 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction.

Meet Ace and Bub, the flying beaver brothers! Ace loves extreme sports and is always looking for a new adventure. Bub loves napping and, well, napping. But when penguins threaten to freeze Beaver Island for "resort and polar-style living," the brothers put their talents to work saving their tropical island paradise. Can they save Beaver Island from environmental destruction? And can they do it in time to still win the annual Beaver Island Surfing Competition?

A haunting chronicle of what endures when the world we know is swept away On a day like any other, on a rafting trip down Utah’s Green River, Stéphane Gerson’s eight-year-old son, Owen, drowned in a spot known as Disaster Falls. That night, as darkness fell, Stéphane huddled in a tent with his wife, Alison, and their older son, Julian, trying to understand what seemed inconceivable. “It’s just the three of us now,” Alison said over the sounds of a light rain and, nearby, the rushing river. “We cannot do it alone. We have to stick together.” Disaster Falls chronicles the aftermath of that day and their shared determination to stay true to Alison’s resolution. At the heart of the book is an unflinching portrait of a marriage tested. Husband and wife grieve in radically different ways that threaten to isolate each of them in their post-Owen worlds. (“He feels so far,” Stéphane says when Alison shows him a selfie Owen had taken. “He feels so close,” she says.) With beautiful specificity, Stéphane shows how they resist that isolation and reconfigure their marriage from within. As Stéphane navigates his grief, the memoir expands to explore how society reacts to the death of a child. He depicts the “good death” of his father, which reveals an altogther different perspective on mortality. He excavates the history of the Green River—rife with hazards not mentioned in the rafting company’s brochures. He explores how stories can both memorialize and obscure a person’s life—and how they can rescue us. Disaster Falls is a powerful account of a life cleaved in two—raw, truthful, and unexpectedly consoling.

A completely new, fresh, and frightening take on "prison literature."

★ Publishers Weekly starred review A Best Book of 2018 in Religion, Publishers Weekly Reading great literature well has the power to cultivate virtue, says acclaimed author Karen Swallow Prior. In this book, she takes readers on a guided tour through works of great literature both ancient and modern, exploring twelve virtues that philosophers and theologians throughout history have identified as most essential for good character and the good life. Covering authors from Henry Fielding to Cormac McCarthy, Jane Austen to George Saunders, and Flannery O'Connor to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Prior explores some of the most compelling universal themes found in the pages of classic books, helping readers learn to love life, literature, and God through their encounters with great writing. The book includes end-of-chapter reflection questions geared toward book club discussions, original artwork throughout, and a foreword by Leland Ryken. The hardcover edition was named a Best Book of 2018 in Religion by Publishers Weekly. "[A] lively treatise on building character through books.'"--Publishers Weekly (starred review)