The rap

by Ernest Brawley

Brawley, Ernest, Rap, The

Genres: Fiction

470 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

Ernest Brawley is a native Californian. His father was a prison guard, and he was raised on the grounds of several penitentiaries. He worked his way through college as a forklift driver at a tomato packing shed, a switchman on the Southern Pacific Railroad, and as a guard at San Quentin Prison, where he saw duty in the Gun Towers, the Big Yard and Death Row. He attended San Francisco State University, where he received a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing. After college, he spent several years traveling the world. Since then, he has spent his life writing novels, teaching, and continuing to travel. He has taught at the University of Hawaii, Hunter College, New York University and the Pantheon-Sorbonne. He is a recipient of the Joseph Henry Jackson Award in Literature and served for several years on the Fiction Award Committee of the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington. At present he resides on the island of Mauritius. Brawley has published four novels, THE RAP, SELENA, THE ALAMO TREE, and LOVE HAS NO COUNTRY. THE RAP and SELENA were recently republished. His latest novel, BLOOD MOON, will be coming out soon.

Reviews

[Jocelyne Forget]

The best non fairy tale you will ever read.
After committing aggravated felonies, Wasco is finally caught and incarcerated in a penitentiary. Nevertheless, the inmate leads, cheats and lies to make the best of his sentence. Around him revolve the lives of the guardians, the tantalizing Moke, an Hawaiian goddess who uses her seductive traits to pursue her long-awaited happiness. With uncommon dexterity, the author, Ernest Brawley mingles between the tragic and the comic, widely playing with the character's intonations along their emotions. This novel is far from a fairy tale but it is one of the best books about the cruel world of prisoners versus wardens, their most inner desires, fears and hopes.

[Aaron]

A colossal achievement in shock value environment and characters. To call it entertainment would announce the earth cracked open and out spewed Hell in the form of some of the most racist, depraved, anti-social, addicted grotesques I've ever encountered outside of a John Waters movie. Yet John Waters movies are funny. This book was a best-seller. Did 1970s readers actually enjoy this book on the beach? To dismiss it as not being an exercise in graphic anthropology is to insult the high quality of its writing. It is undeniably a car-wreck study of a way beyond dysfunctional family of prison guards, their in-laws and assorted other wastrels. The depiction of prison life is unlike anything captured by any other book--including most nonfiction. The story is a vulgar, relentless thriller about an inmate conflict (explosion) to take place in a prison riddled with corruption, but along the way you get chapters that are masterpieces in excess when it comes to rape, degradation, doo-doo humor, an immeasurable amount of slurs and epithets (some I'd never even heard) and the kind morally unfit behavior that now prospers in the Trump cabinet. Is it funny to read? For someone who laughs at people being offended, it's hilarious. For anybody who can't handle the smallest implication that humans are subterranean apes, it is better they stick with Amazon recommendations.