* Jean Genet - Collected Novels, Plays and Nonfiction (16 books)

JEAN GENET (1910 – 1986) was a French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist.  In his early life he was a vagabond and petty criminal, but he later became a writer and playwright.  Many of his works were considered scandalous for their explicit and often deliberately provocative portrayal of homosexuality and criminality, but are today counted among the classics of modern literature, translated and performed throughout the world.

Genet, an illegitimate child abandoned by his mother, was caught stealing at the age of 10 and spent part of his adolescence at a notorious reform school, Mettray, where he experienced much that was later described in the novel MIRACLE OF THE ROSE (1945-46).  His autobiographical THE THIEF'S JOURNAL (1949) gives a complete and uninhibited account of his life as a tramp, pickpocket, and male prostitute in Barcelona, Antwerp, and various other cities (c. 1930-39).  It also reveals him as an aesthete, an existentialist, and a pioneer of the Absurd.

He began to write in 1942 while imprisoned for theft at Fresnes and produced an outstanding novel, OUR LADY OF THE FLOWERS (1943), vividly portraying the prewar Montmartre underworld of thugs, pimps, and perverts.  His talent was brought to the attention of Jean Cocteau and later Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.  Because Genet in 1948 was convicted of theft for the 10th time and would have faced automatic life imprisonment if convicted again, a delegation of well-known writers appealed on his behalf to the president of the French republic, and he was "pardoned in advance."

After writing two other novels, FUNERAL RITES (1947) and QUERELLE (1947), Genet began to experiment with drama.  His plays present highly stylized depictions of ritualistic struggles between outcasts of various kinds and their oppressors.  Social identities are parodied and shown to involve complex layering through manipulation of the dramatic fiction and its inherent potential for theatricality and role-play.  Maids imitate one another and their mistress in THE MAIDS (1947); the clients of a brothel simulate roles of political power before, in a dramatic reversal, actually becoming those figures, all surrounded by mirrors that both reflect and conceal, in THE BALCONY (1957).  Most strikingly, Genet offers a critical dramatisation of what Aimé Césaire called negritude in THE BLACKS (1959), presenting a violent assertion of Black identity and anti-white virulence framed in terms of mask-wearing and roles adopted and discarded.  His most overtly political play is THE SCREENS (1964), an epic account of the Algerian War of Independence.

Genet, a rebel and an anarchist of the most extreme sort, rejected almost all forms of social discipline or political commitment.  The violent and often degraded eroticism of his experience led him to a concept of mystic humiliation.


The following books are in ePUB and/or PDF format as indicated:

== FICTION ==

* Funeral Rites [tr. Frechtman] (Grove, 1994) – ePUB + PDF
* Miracle of the Rose [tr. Frechtman] (Grove, 1994) – ePUB
* Our Lady of the Flowers [tr. Frechtman] (Grove, 1994) – ePUB + PDF
* Querelle [tr. Hollo] (Grove, 1994) – ePUB + PDF
* The Thief's Journal [tr. Frechtman] (Grove, 1994) – ePUB + PDF

== DRAMA ==

* The Balcony [tr. Frechtman] (Grove, 1994) – ePUB + PDF
* The Blacks: A Clown Show [tr. Frechtman] (Grove, 1994) – ePUB + PDF
* The Maids & Deathwatch [tr. Frechtman] (Grove, 1994) – ePUB + PDF
* The Screens [tr. Frechtman] (Grove, 1994) – ePUB + PDF

== POETRY ==

* Treasures of the Night: Collected Poems [tr. Finch] (Gay Sunshine, 1981) – PDF

== NONFICTION ==

* The Criminal Child: Selected Essays [tr. Mandell & Zuckerman] (NYRB, 2020) – ePUB
* The Declared Enemy: Texts and Interviews [ed. Dichy] (Stanford, 2004) – PDF
* Fragments of the Artwork [tr. Mandell] (Stanford, 2003) – PDF
* Prisoner of Love [tr. Bray] (NYRB, 2023) – ePUB
* What Remains of a Rembrandt [tr. Frechtman & Hough] (Hanuman Books, 1988) – PDF

== ANTHOLOGY ==

* Selected Writings [ed. White] (Ecco, 1993) – PDF


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