M. Jean Genet Libri

Jean Genet's seminal Our Lady Of The Flowers (1943) is generally considered to be his finest fictional work. The first draft was written while Genet was incarcerated in a French prison; when the manuscript was discovered and destroyed by officials, Genet, still a prisoner, immediately set about writing it again. It isn't difficult to understand how and why Genet was able to reproduce the novel under such circumstances, because Our Lady Of The Flowers is nothing less than a mythic recreation of Genet's past and then - present history. Combining memories with facts, fantasies, speculations, irrational dreams, tender emotion, empathy, and philosophical insights, Genet probably made his isolation bearable by retreating into a world not only of his own making, but one which he had total control over.

A play about the Algerian War of Independence, and it is an intricately crafted, grandiose construction - beguiling and baffling in equal measure.

In a brothel of an unnamed French city the madam, Irma, directs a series of fantastical scenarios - a bishop forgives a penitent, a judge punishes a thief, a general rides astride his horse. Outside, an uprising threatens to engulf the streets.

'One evening,' wrote Jean Genet in a prefatory note to The Blacks (1959), 'an actor asked me to write a play for an all-black cast.

A beautiful new edition of Jean Genet's classic work, which includes a new introduction by Jon Savage. 'One of the great writers of our times.' Sunday TelegraphQuerelle, a young sailor at large in the port of Brest, is an object of illicit desire to his diary-keeping superior officer, Lieutenant Seblon.

Writing in the intensely lyrical prose style that is his trademark, the man Jean Cocteau dubbed France's 'Black Prince of Letters' her reconstructs his early adult years- time he spent as a petty criminal and vagabond, traveling through Spain and Antwerp, occasionally border hopping across the rest of Europe, always one step ahead of the authorities.

The Maids (Les Bonnes, here translated by Bernard Frechtman) is Jean Genet's most oft-revived work for the stage. Genet's maids - Solange and Claire - occupy themselves, whenever their Madame is out of doors, by acting out ritualised fantasies of revenging their downtrodden status.