Jean Genet

The Thief's Journal (Genet, Jean)

French playwright Genet creates a self-portrait in an account reflecting his life and radical ideas about society

The Thief's Journal

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 peril, Querelle deals in a startling way with the Dostoyevskian theme of murder as an act of total liberation.

Querelle

The clients of a French brothel act out their fantasies while a revolution rages in the city

The Balcony

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.

Funeral Rites

A novel about experiences as a detainee in Mettray Penal Colony and Fontevrault prison.

Miracle of the Rose

Follows the late author's experiences and observations as a visitor to an early 1970s Palestinian refugee camp, in a lyrical and philosophical account that offers insight into the Palestinian cause and the Middle Eastern conflict. Original.

Prisoner of Love

Michel Corvin

Les domestiques sont des êtres humiliés dont la psychologie est pertubée. Austères dans leur robe noire et souliers noirs à talons plats, les bonnes ont pour univers la cuisine et son évier ou la chambre en soupente, dans la mansarde, meublée de deux lits de fer et d'une commode en pitchpin, avec le petit autel à la Sainte Vierge et la branche de buis bénit. Genet a réussi cette pièce, 'Les bonnes', peut-être parce qu'il revivait, à l'intérieur de ses personnages, en l'écrivant, sa propre humiliation.

version définitive (1968), suivie de la première version éditée (1947)

Les Bonnes

Je nomme violence une audace au repos.amoureuse des périls. On la distingue dan un regard, une démarche, un sourire, et c'est en vous qu'elle produit les remous. Elle vous démonte. Cette violence est un calme qui vous agite. On dit quelquefois "Un gars qui a de la gueule". Les traits délicats de Pilorge étaient d'une violence extrême. Leur délicatesse surtout était leur violence.

Journal du voleur

C'est en prison, provoqué par des camarades de cellule qui s'essayaient à imaginer de médiocres pièces sentimentales, que Genet rédigea les strophes du "Condamné à mort" et la dédicace en prose à Maurice Pilorge. En prison aussi qu'il écrivit"Marche funèbre","La galère", "La parade". Autant de poèmes qui sont comme des ex-votos ou comme des bouteilles à la mer.

et autres poèmes ; suivi de Le funambule

Le condamné à mort

An English translation of Genet's symbolic drama which was first performed in Paris in 1959

A Clown Show

The Blacks

Presents two plays that attempt to analyze the mores of the bourgeois society--"The Maids" in which two domestic workers who resent their inferior position try to detroy their employer, and "Deathwatch," which depicts two convicts who try to gain legendary status in criminal circles.

Death Watch

The Maids

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.

Selected Essays

The Criminal Child

Çiçeklerin Meryem Anası

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.

Our Lady of the Flowers

Acik Dusman

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 their employer. When their attempt to betray their mistress’s lover to the police fails and they are in danger of being found out, they dream of murdering Madame, little aware of the true power behind their darkest fantasy. In Deathwatch, two convicts try to impress a third, who is on the verge of achieving legendary status in criminal circles. But neither realizes the lengths to which they will go to gain respect or that, in the end, nothing they can do—including murder—will get them what they are searching for.

Two Plays

The Maids and Deathwatch

Tek Başına - Şatila'da Dört Saat

Nick McDonell

White Mike, a seventeen-year-old prep school dropout and drug dealer, and his privileged peers spend their time partying with sex, drugs, and escalating violence in the pursuit of ever more exotic and dangerous thrills.

Jean Genet

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