The Thief's Journal
List Price: $24.75
Price: $24.75
List Price:
Price: $24.75
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Genet Jean
The Balcony
 List Price: Price: $19.80 DescriptionJean Genet's The Balcony, which premiered in 1957, has come to be recognised as one of the founding plays of modern theatre, and is what the philosopher Lucien Goldmann has called 'the first great Brechtian play in French literature'. 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. The patrons of the brothel wait anxiously for the chief of police to arrive, but in his place comes the queen's envoy to inform that the figureheads of the establishment have been killed in the uprising. Play-acting turns to reality, as the patrons don their costumes in public in the attempt to quell the insurrection. Illusion and reality, order and dissolution - these are the grand themes of The Balcony, all refracted through the prism of Genet's sexualised genius.
The Maids and Deathwatch: Two Plays
 List Price: Price: $4.95 You Save: $9.05 (65%) DescriptionThe 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.
Our Lady of the Flowers
 List Price: Price: $48.90 DescriptionTranslated by Bernard Frechtman and with an introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre, Our Lady of the Flowers was written in a French prison on brown paper from which the convicts were supposed to make paper bags. Its eventual publication by Gallimard put Jean Genet immediately into the front rank of those French writers who expressed their genius through their understanding of the human condition at its lowest. Our Lady of the Flowers himself is a 16-year-old murderer who has fulfilled his destiny by strangling an old man. In the world of Our Lady, of pimps, thieves, prostitutes, queens and blackmailers, morality in the common sense of the word has no meaning. Genet's fantasies from a prison cell, crystallizing round the handsome forms of his criminal heroes, shows his strength as a moralist in making these casebook outlaws into beings of significance to an outwardly ordered society.
Funeral Rites
 List Price: Price: $21.45 DescriptionJean Genet's sensual and brutal portrait of World War Two 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. Powerfully written, and with moments of great poetic subtlety, Funeral Rites is a dark meditation on the mirror images of love and hate, sex and death. Translated by Bernard FrechtmanGenet Jean News
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Film ThreatJEAN GENET'S UN CHANT D'AMOUR (DVD)by Matthew Sorrento Novelist/playwright Jean Genet must have regarded the film medium as a tasty canvas. Used to constructing narrative though language – the vehicle driving his narrator in a novel or the collection of voices in his stage dramas – film