Inside A U.S. Prison Classroom

This story originally appeared in The Guardian.

“This is one of the saddest stories I’ve ever read,” Leo says, looking down at the sheets of paper spread across the desk in front of him. The margins are filled with carefully scribed annotations, each page covered with underlined sentences and circled words. The other men’s pages are similarly filled, as each attempts to make sense of the story before them. 

It is 9.35am on a Saturday morning at a state prison in Massachusetts, where I teach creative writing and literature. We dissect various poems, essays and works of fiction. Our repertoire – ranging from Jonathan Franzen to Jhumpa Lahiri – guides us as we read, write and question our place in the world.
 

Today, we are looking at an excerpt of Khaled Hosseini’s novel And the Mountains Echoed, set in rural Afghanistan. In the story, a mother and father are forced to decide which of their five children they will sacrifice to a mythical demon to not lose them all.

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