Jean Genet

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...

"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,...

Conjured from the unholy meeting of two iconoclastic queer artists, Rainer Werner Fassbinder2s final film audaciously raises Jean Genet2s controversial novel to the level of myth. In an expressionistic soundstage vision of a French seaport town bathed in fiery reds and complete with phallic spires a strapping sailor and unrepentant criminal comes ashore to arouse passion, rivalry, and violence among the libidinal denizens drawn into his orbit. Enacted...