Our Lady of the Flowers, often considered Genet's masterpiece, was written in the cell of a French prison where he was being held for theft. Here is the darker side of Montmartre, a world of pimps, thieves, prostitutes, queens and blackmailers, where 'morality' in the common sense of the word has no meaning. The story of Divine, a drag-queen prostitute, is interwoven with that of one of his lovers, a young man due to be arrested for murder. A story of sex, crime and death, Our Lady of the Flowers is a powerful and original debut novel, which put Genet into the front rank of French writers.

Jean 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.

Jean Genet's masterpiece, composed entirely in the solitude of his prison cell. With an introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre. 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 this world through his protagonist, Divine, a male transvestite prostitute. In the world of Our Lady of the Flowers, moral conventions are turned on their head. Sinners are portrayed as saints and when evil is not celebrated outright, it is at least viewed with a benign indifference. Whether one finds Genet's work shocking or thrilling, the novel remains almost as revolutionary today as when it was first published in 1943 in a limited edition, thanks to the help of one its earliest admirers, Jean Cocteau.

The Thief's Journal is perhaps Jean Genet's most authentically autobiographical novel; an account of his impoverished travels across 1930s Europe. The narrator is guilty of vagrancy, petty theft and prostitution, but his writing transforms such degradations into an inverted moral code, where criminality and delinquency become heroic. With a holy trinity of his own making - homosexuality, theft and betrayal - in The Thief's Journal Genet produced a startlingly powerful novel without precedent.

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. This epic 62-character play almost defies staging and, written at the height of the Algerian War, was initially considered unperformable in France due to the violent political reactions it was bound to arouse. It is one of the most original examples of the avant-garde theatre of the 1960s.

The Barrault-Renaud production was directed by Roger Blin, one of Europe's most respected actors and directors, who was the first to stage all of Samuel Beckett's early plays.

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 Screens"' staging. His comments deal with the details of that play and that production, but also transcend them. What these letters add up to is a precise and fascinating compilation of Jean Genet's concept of the theatre.

This volume also contains two essays by Genet, originally published in the French periodical "Un Tel," giving his striking and highly personal views on life and art.

Splendid's, a two-act police thriller written in 1948, was never staged in Jean Genet's lifetime. In 1952 he announced that he had destroyed the manuscript, and the play was assumed lost. Only in 1993 did a surviving copy reappear. Exhausted, unshaven and wearing evening dress, Genet's gangsters never let go of their machine-guns - not even when they dance together. Their conversations contain some of Genet's finest dialogue; an insane mixture of melodramatic speech-making and low-camp bickering, all wrapped up in a sexy pastiche of forties American film noir, lurching stylishly from tough realism into wicked black humour. Translated by writer, performer and director Neil Bartlett, this volume also contains an introduction by Genet's biographer, Edmund White.

The Maids (Les Bonnes, here translated by Bernard Frechtman) is Jean Genet's most oft-revived work for the stage. First performed in Paris in 1947, its action was inspired by a real-life scandal, the murder by two maids, sisters Christine and Lea Papin, of their mistress and her daughter. 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. But when the game goes beyond their control the maids are compelled to try to make their fantasy a reality. 'The most extraordinary example of the whirligigs of being and appearance, of the imaginary and the real, is to be found in [Genet's] The Maids. It is the element of fake, of sham, of artificiality, that attracts Genet in the theatre.' Jean-Paul Sartre

The Screens was the last of Genet's plays to be performed during his lifetime. Its subject is the Algerian War of Independence, and it is an intricately crafted, grandiose construction - beguiling and baffling in equal measure. While the most openly political of Genet's plays, the work is not revolutionary in intent. Rather, as the play progresses the radical direction of lighting and the use of folding canvases serve to segment and compartmentalise the drama, and in so doing they transform the extremities of war into a series of incantatory scenes, vital and ritualistic, that bring stability to an otherwise unbearable reality. 'The greatness of [The Screens], in all its lurid and unremitting, often comic theatricality, is its deliberate and logical dismantling not just of French identity-France as empire, as power, as history-but of the very notion of identity itself.' Edward Said, Grand Street

This comprehensive guide to the world of terrariums details every part of creating highly unusual and beautiful miniature indoor gardens. Easy to make, these 33 unique terrarium projects are inspired by ecosystems around the world, including a fern-filled Black Forest from Germany, a delicate bonsai garden from Kyushu in the south of Japan, and a tableau of olive and thyme from the shores of the Sea of Galilee in Israel. Lush photography and helpful insider tips and tricks round out this one-of-a-kind handbook. With a variety of projects and plenty of step-by-step instructions covering every element of crafting a terrarium, anyone can fashion a stunning piece of living art.

The complexity of the interplay and relationships over various borders in medieval Europe is here fully teased out. The processes by which ideas, objects, texts and political thought and experience moved across boundaries in the Middle Ages form the focus of this book, which also seeks to reassess the nature of the boundaries themselves; it thus appropriately reflects a major theme of Dr Malcolm Vale's work, which the essays collected here honour. They suggest ways of breaking down established historiographical paradigms of Europe as a set of distinct polities, achieving a more nuanced picture in which people and objects were constantly moving, and challenging previous conceptions of units and borders. The first section examines the construction of boundaries and units in the later Middle Ages, via topics ranging from linguistic units to social stratifications, and geographically from the Netherlands and Scotland to Gascony and the Iberian peninsula; it reveals how much the relationship between exchange and boundaries was reciprocal. The second section considers the mechanisms by which it took place, from West Africa to Italy and Flanders, and discusses the actual exchange of people, texts, and unusual artefacts. Overall, the essays bear witness to the constant interplay and interconnections throughout medieval Europe and beyond. Contributors: Paul Booth, Maria Joao Violante Branco, Rita Costa-Gomes, Mario Damen, Jan Dumolyn, Jean Dunbabin, Jean-PhilippeGenet, Michael Jones, Maurice Keen, Frederique Lachaud, Patrick Lantschner, Guilhem Pepin, R.L.J. Shaw, Hannah Skoda, Erik Spindler, John Watts.

This posthumous work brings together articles, interviews, statements, prefaces, manifestos, and speeches dating from 1964 to 1985 (just before Genet's death in 1986). These texts bear witness to the many political causes and groups with which Genet felt an affinity, including May '68 and the treatment of immigrants in France, but especially the Black Panthers and the Palestinians. We follow him from the Chicago Democratic Convention (where he met William Burroughs and Alan Ginsberg) to Yale University, where he gave the famous May Day Speech in support of the Black Panthers, to Jordan and the Palestinian camps. Along the way, Genet finds allies (George Jackson, Angela Davis, Leyla Shahid, Tahar Ben Jelloun). And, of course, enemies. Between passionate enmity and passionate affinity, Genet speaks for a politics of protest, with an uncompromising outrage that, today, might seem on the verge of being forgotten. The texts are accompanied by detailed editorial notes.

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.

Genet's sensual and brutal portrait of World War II 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. Elegaic, macabre, chimerical, Funeral Rites is a dark meditation on the mirror images of love and hate, sex and death.

IN IMPERIAL JAPAN, IT TAKES STRENGTH AND COURAGE TO BECOME A WARRIOR...TO BECOME A SAMURAI. Now reunited, Takeo and his brother face a difficult path - tracing their painful family history, so that they may finally regain their honor! But destiny has even more obstacles in store for them...When the peaceful town where they have come to rest is plunged into a deadly conflict between the local suzerain, the Ishozu monks and the yakuzas, the Samurai brothers must once again draw their swords! With the secrets of the kingdom's most powerful men hanging in the balance, is this a fight they can ever win "

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 Telegraph

Querelle, a young sailor at large in the port of Brest, is an object of illicit desire to his diary-keeping superior officer, Lieutenant Seblon. He is coveted, too, by a corrupt policeman, Mario, and gives himself freely both to brothel-keeper Madame Lysiane and to her husband. But Querelle is a thief and a murderer - not a man to be trusted or trifled with.

Takeo has finally achieved his dream; he has left behind the darkness of his past and become a Samurai. Yet Imperial Japan is in turmoil; General Akuma, one of the Empire's most powerful men has turned his back on the Emperor, and is planning to betray him. The two men are linked by a dark secret; the 13th prophet. It is into this mysterious feud that Takeo will stray on his quest to find out who he really is...

Jean Genet, French playwright, novelist and poet, turned the experiences in his life amongst pimps, whores, thugs and other fellow social outcasts into a poetic literature, with an honesty and explicitness unprecedented at the time. Widely considered an outstanding and unique figure in French literature, Genet wrote five novels between 1942 and 1947, now being republished by Faber & Faber in beautiful new paperback editions.

Jean Genet began to write his third novel in 1943, but it was to be changed utterly by the death of Jean Decarnin. Genet's sensual and brutal portrait of the Second World War 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.

Includes a new introduction by Neil Bartlett.

Three young convicts share a cell. Locked into a world of dangerous rivalries, criminals Lefranc and Maurice compete for the attention of the charismatic condemned man, Green-Eyes. Informed by his own experience in French prisons, Jean Genet's first play, Deathwatch is an explosive exploration of the inversion of moral order. Genet was one of the most prominent and provocative writers of the twentieth century. Jean Genet's Deathwatch premiered in this translation by David Rudkin with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1987 and was revived at the Print Room, London, in April 2016.

'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. But what exactly is a black? First of all, what's his colour?' Stereotyping, masking and clowning would be the tools with which Genet dissected settled ideas of race and identity in this, one of his most successful (and controversial) works for the stage. 'In form, [The Blacks] flows as freely as an improvisation, with fantasy, allegory and intimations of reality mingled into a weird, stirring unity... Genet's investigation of the color black begins where most plays of this burning theme leave off.' New York Times

Jean Genet, French playwright, novelist and poet, turned the experiences in his life amongst pimps, whores, thugs and other fellow social outcasts into a poetic literature, with an honesty and explicitness unprecedented at the time. Widely considered an outstanding and unique figure in French literature, Genet wrote five novels between 1942 and 1947, now being republished by Faber & Faber in beautiful new paperback editions.

Miracle of the Rose was Jean Genet's second novel, composed in 1943 while incarcerated in prison. The novel is informed by Genet's memories of confinement, both in prison and the Mettray reformatory where he spent three years from the age of 15. The central figure of the novel is Harcamone, whom Genet first encountered at Mettray, and who resurfaces in an adult prison -- now a murderer and, in the world-turned-upside-down of Genet's vision, a quasi-divine figure.

Includes a new introduction by Terry Hands.

Having escaped from the clutches of the 13th Prophet, Takeo, the young Samurai, is free to continue with his quest to find out who he is. His journey leads him to an unnamed island, where he hopes to find his missing brother. Instead, he finds a place where he learns the Bushido way, the code of life that all Samurai must live by "

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.

First published in France in 1949, The Thief's Journal is Jean Genet's iconic work of autobiographical fiction. This new edition brings his legendary genius to future generations of readers, with an introduction by Genet's great admirer, Patti Smith. From a prison cell, the journal's narrator recounts his travels across Europe in the 1930s--as a vagabond, pickpocket, and occasional prostitute--in pursuit of spiritual fulfilment through erotic trysts and evil deeds. Worshipping his own holy trinity of homosexuality, theft, and betrayal, he conducts every burglary, and each sexual encounter, with the elaborate, reverent ritual of a religious ceremony. Dressed in rags and stealing for his survival, he must evade the authorities for as long as possible. A sensuous and philosophical reverie on freedom within confinement, the heroism of the outlaw, and deception as the ultimate act of devotion, The Thief's Journal exemplifies the exquisitely lyrical combination of fact and fiction that made Genet a major figure in world literature.