Customer Reviews

Teach the Free Man: Stories

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I can't praise Teach the Free Man enough. This is the most powerful book of short stories I've read in decades. I'm hugely inspired! Peter Malae is a courageous young writer of an order I'd forlornly thought had vanished forever from American literature. Like Hugo, Dickens, Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Dostoyevsky (writers with whom Malae is safely and correctly compared), he understands at core creative level that each sentence, each incident, each word of one's "fiction" -- if it is to be spiritually and artistically authentic -- must be forged in the white-hot oven of one's own heart. Malae bravely does this in every story of the collection, bar none! It's astonishing. Not once did I sense laziness or falsity. Graduate and survivor of the American Gulag, Malae takes us to horrifying intersections where almost every character, con and guard alike, is embroiled in an excruciating conflict that has separated them from his or her inner truth. That these white-hot stories -- violent, sagely, and often demonic -- take place in California's maximum security prisons is, in a sense, almost redundant. Malae doesn't depend on the hellishness of American prisons to make his points and discoveries: he plunges straight down into the heart like an incandescent dagger, right into envy, jealousy, hatred, revenge, grief, pity, feelings of blame and self-pity that are rendered with a master's touch. Scarlet feelings splash over us and scorch our conscience. These stories are not only authentic literature of the first rank, they are socially rebellious and instructive in the same way Dickens intended his fiction to be: illuminating yet in no way didactic. If you were blind to the wickedness and dehumanzation of the American penal institution, if you had doubts about the need to reform it totally, this book will wake you up fast. In my estimation Peter Malae transcends Bunker, Abbot, and others to whom he could be facilely compared because he's a significantly deeper artist. Peter Nathaniel Malae, it seems to me, is a young Victor Hugo and, if American literature is to graduate from its current infantilism, narcissism, and irrelevance, we should be thankful that he has appeared. I closed the book with a feeling of Cosmic Clarity for which I am deeply grateful. I can offer no greater acknowledgment.