Description: This innovative history explores the rich tradition of music behind bars and shows how policing and prisons have shaped our musical culture from blues to hip-hop.
Brief description: Colin Asher is the author of the critically acclaimed Never a Lovely So Real. His work has been featured in the Believer, the Baffler, the New Republic, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Review Quotes: As Colin Asher's hauntingly beautiful The Midnight Special reveals, despite America's seemingly insatiable desire to silence human beings behind its highest and thickest prison walls, the music that so many nevertheless manage to create inside--their powerful lyrics, notes, rhythms, harmonies, beats, and refrains--has transcended those brutal spaces. Thanks to his extraordinary book, we are able truly to hear these joyful, angry, rebellious, and audacious sounds. It is a true gift--one that reminds us of the resilience of the human spirit, even in the most brutal of confines.--Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy