Tell me,’ I said, ‘what is the bigger sin – a man eating an apple or punishing all of humanity with torture because a man ate an apple?’

Schrijver Ahmet Altan is 68 jaar en zal de rest van zijn leven drieëntwintig uur per dag doorbrengen in een cel. Zoals de titel van het boek al zegt: hij zal de wereld nooit meer zien. Ik vind het ontzettend knap dat de auteur zo positief blijft, terwijl hij leeft in gevangenschap. Hij zit immers in een uitzichtloze situatie. A working journalist for more than twenty years, he has served in all stages of the profession, from being a night shift reporter to editor in chief in various newspapers.

On one side of this reality was a body made of flesh, bone, blood, muscle and nerve that was trapped. On the other side was a mind that did not care about and made fun of what would happen to that body, a mind that looked from above at what was happening and what was yet to happen, that believed itself untouchable and was, therefore, untouchable. Having been a dissenting voice for many years, Altan was not surprised at being arrested. Since Erdoğan took power, democracy and freedom of speech in Turkey, already shaky, have become even less certain. Altan was, however, disappointed by the vagueness of his charge – transmitting “subliminal messages” on a television show the night before the coup – and upset by modern Turkey’s vertiginous descent into nightmarish absurdity. In putting the emphasis on the power of the imagination to transcend the physical incarceration, this sounds reminiscent of Jean Genet, the famous French prison writer, who basically just fantasizes his way out of his cell, which actually led to him physically coming out of the cell because he was championed by the intellectuals of the day. I can’t see that happening in Turkey.

The colonel across from me turned to his side, groaning; the shadow of the bar cut off half his face. Over the next few years, Zhang began accompanying Luo Ze and other local mountaineers on expeditions across western China. He completed a series of increasingly challenging climbs: Luodui Peak (6,010 meters) and Chomolhari Kang (7,050 meters) in Tibet, followed by Muztagh Ata (7,546 meters) in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Readers may have followed the furore over the statue of Mary Wollstonecraft, erected to honour the writer, philosopher and advocate of women’s rights near her erstwhile home in Newington Green, North London. Ever since it was unveiled in November – the result of a ten-year-long campaign led by the writer Bee Lowlatt – it has caused controversy and fired debate. I can understand why some people, especially victims of abuse, might send this book windmilling across the room. But I don’t think V wrote it as a prescription for victims. Rather, she says the book is an offering of what’s been healing for her. Yasemin Çongar is the co-founder and general director of P24, a nonprofit platform for independent journalism in Istanbul. She is also the founder of K24, a Turkish literary review, and, most recently, the Istanbul Literature House. An editor, essayist, and translator, Çongar is the author of four books in Turkish.I was the lieutenant happily eating cherries with a gun pointing at his heart. I was Borges telling the mugger to take his life. I was Caesar building walls around Alesia. But for most people, it’s nothing like that. The idea that you’ve got that degree of control seems to be, to me, a sentimental view of what it would be like to be both in these sort of cycles of crime that you’ve described, but also within a prison system where you are powerless in all kinds of ways, not just in relation to the officers or the system there, but also to the internal subsystems of the prisoners around you, and what they might do to you or not allow you, the power that they might exercise over you. So it’s interesting that these last two books you’ve chosen recognize the degree to which you’re powerless in that situation and how that, in itself, is quite a terror. If you have a goal in your mind, don’t hesitate — just go for it,” says Zhang. “It’s impossible for people to see what will happen tomorrow, so why not have a try?”

A resilient Turkish writer's inspiring account of his imprisonment that provides crucial insight into political censorship amidst the global rise of authoritarianism. The raging nothingness is palpable. How curious it is never to encounter a mirror and see one’s own face, just hands and feet. Not speaking but wanting to scream. The terrifying urge to shout and the pressure of knowing that this shout would destroy my whole life were like two mountains colliding and crushing me in between.

On May 20, the team — accompanied by three Sherpas — set out for the summit. They began by passing through the Khumbu Glacier, before stopping at four camps along the route, where they were able to rest and resupply. During the ascent, Zhang insisted on doing everything himself — only accepting help when absolutely necessary.

Altan descends into a ghostly underworld. “Here in depths without light, the police, with each of their gestures and words, carved us out of life like a rotten, maggot-laced chunk from a pear, severing us from the world of ‘the living.’” He and the other prisoners are in between worlds, in a narrow gap between the living and the dead. What she’s doing from the way you’ve described it is to reveal the degree to which she’s been harmed by her father. Had he been a different person he might have realized that, but he wasn’t. At the time, the idea sounded ludicrous — even to Zhang himself. “I had never seen a snowy mountain before and I didn’t have any experience of outdoor sports,” he says. Altan sa vo väzení stretáva s ľuďmi, ktorí nechcú svoju slobodu a možnosť nižšieho trestu vymeniť za udavačstvo.He robbed the bank during a relapse into heroin and coke. Later in the book, Reid tells us about how when he was 11 years old, an older man who was a doctor invited him into his car, injected him with morphine and sexually abused him whilst he was high. Reid spent the next four decades chasing after that high, whilst also trying to run away from that trauma. He did some crazy things in that turmoil. He says he wishes he could give a meat cleaver to a metaphysical butcher who would just cut out the 5% of him that was violent and dangerous and leave him with the sane, caring, good-natured parts of himself. Instead, he must sit in prison, a man unredeemed and “all out of illusions.”