Jean Genet's first, and arguably greatest, novel was written while he was in prison. As Sartre recounts in his introduction, Genet penned this work on the brown paper which inmates were supposed to use to fold bags as a form of occupational therapy. The masterpiece he managed to produce under those difficult conditions is a lyrical portrait of the criminal underground of Paris and the thieves, murderers and pimps who occupied it. Genet approached this world through his protagonist, Divine, a male transvestite prostitute. In the world of Our Lady of the Flowers, moral conventions are turned on...

Genet's sensual and brutal portrait of World War II unfolds between the poles of his grief for his lover Jean, killed in the Resistance during the liberation of Paris, and his perverse attraction to the collaborator Riton. Elegaic, macabre, chimerical, Funeral Rites is a dark meditation on the mirror images of love and hate, sex and death."

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.

Book jacket/back: The setting of Jean Genet's celebrated play is a brothel that caters to refined sensibilities and peculiar tastes. Here men from all walks of life don the garb of their fantasies and act them out: a man from the gas company wears the robe and mitre of a bishop; another customer becomes a flagellant judge, and still another a victorious general, while a bank clerk defiles the Virgin mary. These costumed diversions take place while outside a revolution rages which has isolated the brothel from the rest of the rebel-controlled city. In a stunning series of macabre, climactic...

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...

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."

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 The Blacks.
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 screensthe only sceneryin a brilliant tour de...

This posthumous work brings together articles, interviews, statements, prefaces, manifestos, and speeches dating from 1964 to 1985 (just before Genet's death in 1986). These texts 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. We follow him from the Chicago Democratic Convention (where he met William Burroughs and Alan Ginsberg) to Yale University, where he gave the famous May Day Speech in support of the Black Panthers, to Jordan and...

This posthumous work brings together articles, interviews, statements, prefaces, manifestos, and speeches dating from 1964 to 1985 (just before Genet's death in 1986). These texts 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. We follow him from the Chicago Democratic Convention (where he met William Burroughs and Alan Ginsberg) to Yale University, where he gave the famous May Day Speech in support of the Black Panthers, to Jordan and...

A collection of Jackson's letters from prison, "Soledad Brother" is an outspoken condemnation of the racism of white America and a powerful appraisal of the prison system that failed to break his spirit but eventually took his life. Jackson's letters make palpable the intense feelings of anger and rebellion that filled black men in America's prisons in the 1960s. But even removed from the social and political firestorms of the 1960s, Jackson's story still resonates for its portrait of a man taking a stand even while locked down.