The Criminal Child

The Criminal Child
Author: Jean Genet
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 129
Release: 2020-01-21
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1681373629

The Criminal Child offers the first English translation of a key early work by Jean Genet. In 1949, in the midst of a national debate about improving the French reform-school system, Radiodiffusion Française commissioned Genet to write about his experience as a juvenile delinquent. He sent back a piece that was a paean to prison instead of the expected horrifying exposé. Revisiting the cruel hazing rituals that had accompanied his incarceration, relishing the special argot spoken behind bars, Genet bitterly denounced any improvement in the condition of young prisoners as a threat to their criminal souls. The radio station chose not to broadcast Genet’s views. “The Criminal Child” appears here with a selection of Genet’s finest essays, including his celebrated piece on the art of Alberto Giacometti.

Our Lady of the Flowers

Our Lady of the Flowers
Author: Jean Genet
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
Total Pages: 207
Release: 1994-01-12
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0802194249

The shattering novel of underground life the New York Times called “a cry of rapture and horror . . . the purest lyrical genius.” Jean Genet’s debut novel Our Lady of the Flowers, which is often considered to be his masterpiece, was written entirely in the solitude of a prison cell. A semi- autobiographical account of one man’s journey through the Paris demi-monde, dubbed “the epic of masturbation” by no less a figure than Jean-Paul Sartre, the novel’s exceptional value lies in its exquisite ambiguity.

Prisoner of Love

Prisoner of Love
Author: Jean Genet
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 460
Release: 2023-05-31
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1681378418

Starting in 1970, Jean Genet—petty thief, prostitute, modernist master—spent two years in the Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan. Always an outcast himself, Genet was drawn to this displaced people, an attraction that was to prove as complicated for him as it was enduring. Prisoner of Love, written some ten years later, when many of the men Genet had known had been killed, and he himself was dying, is a beautifully observed description of that time and those men as well as a reaffirmation of the author's commitment not only to the Palestinian revolution but to rebellion itself. For Genet's most overtly political book is also his most personal—the last step in the unrepentantly sacrilegious pilgrimage first recorded in The Thief's Journal, and a searching meditation, packed with visions, ruses, and contradictions, on such life-and-death issues as the politics of the image and the seductive and treacherous character of identity. Genet's final masterpiece is a lyrical and philosophical voyage to the bloody intersection of oppression, terror, and desire at the heart of the contemporary world.

The Screens

The Screens
Author: Jean Genet
Publisher: Grove Press
Total Pages: 210
Release: 1994-01-20
Genre: Antiques & Collectibles
ISBN: 0802151582

Explicitly political, The Screens is set within the context of the Algerian War. The play's cast of over fifty characters moves through seventeen scenes, the world of the living breaching the world of the dead by means of shifting the screens--the only scenery--in a brilliant tour de force of spectacle and drama.

Funeral Rites

Funeral Rites
Author: Jean Genet
Publisher: Grove Press
Total Pages: 266
Release: 1969
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780802130877

A fictionalized account of the author's lover, Jean Decarin, who was killed in the Resistance during the liberation of Paris in World War II.

Jean Genet in Tangier

Jean Genet in Tangier
Author: Muḥammad Shukrī
Publisher: Ecco
Total Pages: 96
Release: 1974
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

Saint Genet

Saint Genet
Author: Jean-Paul Sartre
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 637
Release: 2012-02-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0816677603

The remarkable and controversial study of the mind, life, and legend of Jean Genet

The Declared Enemy

The Declared Enemy
Author: Jean Genet
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 412
Release: 2004
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780804729468

This posthumous work brings together texts that bear witness to the many political causes and groups with which Genet felt an affinity, including May '68 and the treatment of immigrants in France, but especially the Black Panthers and the Palestinians. Genet speaks for a politics of protest, with an uncompromising outrage that, today, might seem on the verge of being forgotten.