Difficult though it may be to imagine a world without the need for prisons, the literature of incarceration issues from the human spirit’s chafing at the idea of confinement, its instinctive hatred for the apparatus of punishment. The best of it is by former prisoners themselves: Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s House of the Dead, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Henri Charrière’s Papillon, and Malcolm Braly’s On the Yard are indispensable accounts of how prison deforms the soul.

No less fascinating are those attempts by authors outside of the system to, in effect, do somebody else’s time. These acts of imaginative empathy—like John Cheever’s Falconer or even Stephen King’s pulpy novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption—are valuable in a different way, as explorations of fear and exercises in compassion. To walk a mile in another man’s shackles is one of the greatest challenges of art or life. In her third novel, The Mars Room, Rachel Kushner walks a razor’s edge between compassion and credulity to show us the truth. And the truth hurts.