Riots I Have Known

By: Ryan Chapman

Narrated by: Vikas Adam

Longlisted for the 2019 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, Ryan Chapman’s “gritty, bracing debut” (Esquire) set during a prison riot is “dark, daring, and laugh-out-loud hilarious…one of the smartest—and best—novels of the year” (NPR).

A largescale riot rages through Westbrook prison in upstate New York, incited by a poem in the house literary journal. Our unnamed narrator, barricaded inside the computer lab, swears he’s blameless—even though, as editor-in-chief, he published the piece in question. As he awaits violent interruption by his many, many enemies, he liveblogs one final Editor’s Letter. Riots I Have Known is his memoir, confession, and act of literary revenge.

His tale spans a childhood in Sri Lanka, navigating the postwar black markets and hotel chains; employment as a Park Avenue doorman, serving the widows of the one percent; life in prison, with the silver lining of his beloved McNairy; and his stewardship of The Holding Pen, a “masterpiece of post-penal literature” favored by Brooklynites everywhere. All will be revealed, and everyone will see he’s really a good guy, doing it for the right reasons.

“Fitfully funny and murderously wry,” Riots I Have Known is “a frenzied yet wistful monologue from a lover of literature under siege” (Kirkus Reviews).

Wonderfully unreliable narrator--

By turns funny, provocative, and contradictory, Chapman's book is a marvel. This is clearly not a book for everyone--fair warning--but if you love assessing the voice and reliability of your first-person narrators, this book is for you. Don't look for a linear plot or a character you will know deeply--MF withholds, dissembles, and exaggerates such that we cannot know him in any real or meaningful way. And that is ultimately what makes the thing so satisfying and unsatisfying at the same time.