Jean Genet: 11 books

Jean Genet's seminal Our Lady Of The Flowers (1943) is generally considered to be his finest fictional work. The first draft was written while Genet was incarcerated in a French prison; when the manuscript was discovered and destroyed by officials, Genet, still a prisoner, immediately set about writing...

“The mist beautiful book that Genet has written.” -Jean-Paul Sartre The Thief’s Journal is perhaps Jean Genet’s most authentically biographical novel, personifying his quest for spiritual glory through the pursuit of evil. Writing in the intensely lyrical prose style that is his trademark,...

“One of the greatest achievements of modern literature.”-Richard Howard“A major achievement . . . . Genet transforms experiences of degradation into spiri­tual exercises and hoodlums into bearers of the majesty of love.”-Saturday Review“Genet can use a brutal phraseology that makes prison life...

“Yeats once remarked that the only two subjects worth of a serious mind are sex and death. Had he been born a generation later, he would have lived long enough to find the perfect embodiment of his thesis in Genet.” -Atlanta Journal“Only a handful of twentieth-century writers, such as Kafka and Proust,...

An English translation of Genet’s classic symbolic drama, first performed in Paris in 1959.   France’s master of the absurd explores racial prejudice and stereotypes using the framework of a play within a play. The New York Times hailed The Blacks as “one of the most original and stimulating...

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...

A wildly fantastical and ever relevant dramatic masterpiece that reinvented modern theater in the twentieth century. In the midst of a war-ravished city, a brothel caters to the elaborate role-playing fantasies of men from all walks of life. A of the gas company employee pretends to be a bishop,...

The two plays collected in this volume represent Genet’s first attempts to analyze the mores of a bourgeois society he had previously been content simply to vilify. In The Maids, two domestic workers, deeply resentful of their inferior social position, try to revenge themselves against society by destroying...

Querelle is regarded by many critics as Jean Genet’s highest achievement in the novel-certainly one of the landmarks of postwar French literature. The story of a dangerous man seduced by danger, it deals in a startling way with the Dostoevskian theme of murder as an act of total liberation, and as...

Jean Genet was one of the world’s greatest contemporary dramatists, and his last play, The Screens, is his crowning achievement. It strikes a powerful, closing chord to the formidable theatrical work that began with Deathwatch and continued, with even bolder variations, in The Maids, The Balcony, and...

Genet's fictionalized and distant account of his rambles through France, Czechoslavakia, Germany and elsewhere in the '30s and '40s, covering his time in prison, his relationships with men such as the one-armed Stilitano, along with erotic accounts of his lovers during the period, and interspersed with meditation and daydreams.