Jean Genet

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 scenes, Genet presents his caustic view of man and society.

The Thief's Journal (Journal du voleur, published in 1949) is a novel by Jean Genet. It is a part-fact, part-fiction autobiography that charts the author's progress through Europe in a depoliticized 1930s, wearing nothing but rags and enduring hunger, contempt, fatigue and vice. The main character encounters bars, dives, flophouses, robbery, prison and expulsion in Spain, Italy, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Nazi Germany and Belgium. The novel is structured around a series of homosexual love affairs and male prostitution between the author/anti-hero and various criminals, con artists, pimps, and a detective.

Testo Originale Francese a frontepagina

Excerpts from the novels: Our lady of the flowers, Miracle of the rose, Funeral rites, Querelle, The thief's journal; poetry: The fisherman of Suquet; theater: The maids, The balcony; essay: The studio of Alberto Giacometti; film: The penal colony: comments on the cinema; memoir: Prisoner of love; letters: To Sartre, To java; interview: with Madeleine Gobeil.

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.

"Elle is a psychological thriller that recounts thirty days in the life of its heroine Michele--powerfully portrayed by Isabelle Huppert in Paul Verhoeven's award-winning film--where memory, sex, and death collide at every turn"--

From Library Journal Jackson gained notoriety shortly before his death in 1970 when his younger brother unsuccessfully tried to free him at gunpoint when Jackson and two others were on trial for killing a guard. Written between 1964 and 1970 while serving time in Soledad Prison for robbery, the letters reveal the brutality and racism faced by prisoners and call for unity among African Americans. This edition contains a new foreword by Jackson's nephew Jonathan. Soledad Brother remains "recommended for most libraries" and is a solid title for Black History Month in February. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"Jean Genet's The Screens, hailed by many to be Genet's masterpiece, was staged in Paris in 1966 by the Jean-Louis Barrault-Madeleine Renaud Company. During the several months of rehearsals which Genet attended, he wrote a series of letters and notes to Roger Blin giving his views on every aspect of the staging of The Screens. His comments deal with the details of that play and that production, but also transcend them. What the book adds up to is a precise and fascinating compilation of Jean Genet's concept of the theater."--Page 4 of cover.

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 screens -- the only scenery -- in a brilliant tour de force of spectacle and drama.