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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This nightmarish account of prison life during the German occupation of France is dominated by the figure of the condemned murderer Harcamone, who takes root and bears unearthly blooms in the ecstatic and brooding imagination of his fellow prisoner Genet.

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

Now in paperback, The Crime of Jean Genet is a powerful personal account of the influence of one writer on another and one of the most penetrating explorations yet of Genet's work and achievement. Dominique Eddé met novelist and playwright Jean Genet in the 1970s. And she never forgot him. "His presence," she writes, "gave me the sensation of icy fire. Like his words, his gestures were full, calculated and precise. . . . Genet's movements mimicked the movement of time, accumulating rather than passing." This book is Eddé's account of that meeting and its ripples through her years of engaging with Genet's life and work. Rooted in personal reminiscences, it is nonetheless much broader, offering a subtle analysis of Genet's work and teasing out largely unconsidered themes, like the absence of the father, which becomes a metaphor for Genet's perpetual attack on the law. Tying Genet to Dostoevsky through their shared fascination with crime, Eddé helps us more clearly understand Genet's relationship to France and Palestine, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, the theater, and even death. A powerful personal account of the influence of one writer on another, The Crime of Jean Genet is also one of the most penetrating explorations yet of Genet's work and achievement.