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Our Lady of the Flowers (Paperback, New Edition): Jean Genet Our Lady of the Flowers (Paperback, New Edition)
Jean Genet; Translated by Bernard Frechtman 1
R315 R245 Discovery Miles 2 450 Save R70 (22%) Ships in 12 - 17 working days

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.

The Balcony (Paperback, Main): Jean Genet The Balcony (Paperback, Main)
Jean Genet
R401 Discovery Miles 4 010 Ships in 9 - 15 working days

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.

The Thief's Journal (Paperback, New Edition): Jean Genet The Thief's Journal (Paperback, New Edition)
Jean Genet; Translated by Bernard Frechtman 2
R310 R240 Discovery Miles 2 400 Save R70 (23%) Ships in 12 - 17 working days

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.

Reflections on the Theatre - And Other Writings (Paperback, Main): Jean Genet Reflections on the Theatre - And Other Writings (Paperback, Main)
Jean Genet
R539 Discovery Miles 5 390 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

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 (Paperback, Main): Jean Genet Splendid's (Paperback, Main)
Jean Genet
R431 Discovery Miles 4 310 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

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 (Paperback, Main): Jean Genet The Maids (Paperback, Main)
Jean Genet; Translated by Benedict Andrews, Andrew Upton
R429 Discovery Miles 4 290 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

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 (Paperback, Main): Jean Genet The Screens (Paperback, Main)
Jean Genet
R443 Discovery Miles 4 430 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

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

Miracle of the Rose (Paperback, New Edition): Jean Genet Miracle of the Rose (Paperback, New Edition)
Jean Genet 1
R313 R243 Discovery Miles 2 430 Save R70 (22%) Ships in 12 - 17 working days

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.

Funeral Rites (Paperback, New Edition): Jean Genet Funeral Rites (Paperback, New Edition)
Jean Genet 1
R311 R240 Discovery Miles 2 400 Save R71 (23%) Ships in 12 - 17 working days

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.

The Declared Enemy - Texts and Interviews (Paperback): Jean Genet The Declared Enemy - Texts and Interviews (Paperback)
Jean Genet; Edited by Albert Dichy; Translated by Jeff Fort
R1,008 R925 Discovery Miles 9 250 Save R83 (8%) Ships in 10 - 15 working days

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.

Deathwatch (Paperback, Main): Jean Genet Deathwatch (Paperback, Main)
Jean Genet
R300 R251 Discovery Miles 2 510 Save R49 (16%) Ships in 12 - 17 working days

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.

Funeral Rites (Paperback): Jean Genet Funeral Rites (Paperback)
Jean Genet
R464 R387 Discovery Miles 3 870 Save R77 (17%) Ships in 10 - 15 working days

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.

The Blacks (Paperback, Main): Jean Genet The Blacks (Paperback, Main)
Jean Genet
R433 Discovery Miles 4 330 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

'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

The Thief's Journal (Paperback): Jean Genet The Thief's Journal (Paperback)
Jean Genet; Foreword by Jean-Paul Sartre; Introduction by Patti Smith
R435 R363 Discovery Miles 3 630 Save R72 (17%) Ships in 10 - 15 working days

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.

Criminal Child - Selected Essays (Paperback): Jean Genet, Jeffrey Zuckerman Criminal Child - Selected Essays (Paperback)
Jean Genet, Jeffrey Zuckerman
R367 Discovery Miles 3 670 Ships in 12 - 17 working days
Querelle of Brest (Paperback, New Edition): Jean Genet Querelle of Brest (Paperback, New Edition)
Jean Genet 1
R314 R244 Discovery Miles 2 440 Save R70 (22%) Ships in 12 - 17 working days

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.

Soledad Brother - The Prison Letters of George Jackson (Paperback, New edition): George Jackson, Jean Genet, Jonathan Jackson Soledad Brother - The Prison Letters of George Jackson (Paperback, New edition)
George Jackson, Jean Genet, Jonathan Jackson 1
R556 R462 Discovery Miles 4 620 Save R94 (17%) Ships in 10 - 15 working days

A collection of Jackson's letters from prison, "Soledad Brother" is an outspoken condemnation of the racism of white America and a powerful appraisal of the prison system that failed to break his spirit but eventually took his life. Jackson's letters make palpable the intense feelings of anger and rebellion that filled black men in America's prisons in the 1960s. But even removed from the social and political firestorms of the 1960s, Jackson's story still resonates for its portrait of a man taking a stand even while locked down.

The Declared Enemy - Texts and Interviews (Hardcover, New): Jean Genet The Declared Enemy - Texts and Interviews (Hardcover, New)
Jean Genet; Edited by Albert Dichy; Translated by Jeff Fort
R4,234 Discovery Miles 42 340 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

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.

The Maids / Deathwatch (Paperback, Revised edition): Jean Genet The Maids / Deathwatch (Paperback, Revised edition)
Jean Genet
R466 R382 Discovery Miles 3 820 Save R84 (18%) Ships in 10 - 15 working days

The 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. In The Maids, two domestic workers, deeply resentful of their inferior social position, try to revenge themselves against society by destroying their employer. When their attempt to betray their mistress's lover to the police fails and they are in danger of being found out, they dream of murdering Madame, little aware of the true power behind their darkest fantasy.
In Deathwatch, two convicts try to impress a third, who is on the verge of achieving legendary status in criminal circles. But neither realizes the lengths to which they will go to gain respect or that, in the end, nothing they can do--including murder--will get them what they are searching for.

The Balcony (Le Balcon) - A Play in Nine Scenes (Paperback, REV ed.): Jean Genet The Balcony (Le Balcon) - A Play in Nine Scenes (Paperback, REV ed.)
Jean Genet
R407 R331 Discovery Miles 3 310 Save R76 (19%) Ships in 10 - 15 working days

Book jacket/back: The setting of Jean Genet's celebrated play is a brothel that caters to refined sensibilities and peculiar tastes. Here men from all walks of life don the garb of their fantasies and act them out: a man from the gas company wears the robe and mitre of a bishop; another customer becomes a flagellant judge, and still another a victorious general, while a bank clerk defiles the Virgin mary. These costumed diversions take place while outside a revolution rages which has isolated the brothel from the rest of the rebel-controlled city. In a stunning series of macabre, climactic scenes, Genet presents his caustic view of man and society.

Querelle (Paperback): Jean Genet Querelle (Paperback)
Jean Genet
R434 R368 Discovery Miles 3 680 Save R66 (15%) Ships in 10 - 15 working days

"It is awesome, perhaps the finest novel I have ever read in my life. It literally sent shivers through me, the sheer beauty of the language, the exquisite perversity of the imagination, the incredible grasp of motivation-it is his most tightly plotted, best organized, most accessible novel. It is a wonder." -Dotson Rader Querelle is regarded by many critics as Jean Genet's highest achievement in the novel-certainly one of the landmarks of postwar French literature. The story of a dangerous man seduced by danger, it deals in a startling way with the Dostoevskian theme of murder as an act of total liberation, and as a pact demanding an answering sacrifice.

The Blacks: a Clown Show (Paperback): Jean Genet The Blacks: a Clown Show (Paperback)
Jean Genet
R410 R335 Discovery Miles 3 350 Save R75 (18%) Ships in 10 - 15 working days

An English translation of Genet's symbolic drama which was first performed in Paris in 1959.

The Selected Writings of Jean Genet (Paperback): Jean Genet The Selected Writings of Jean Genet (Paperback)
Jean Genet
R696 R621 Discovery Miles 6 210 Save R75 (11%) Ships in 10 - 15 working days

Excerpts from the novels, plays, and poems of the French convict, prostitute, and literary artist join notes from his film, The Penal Colony, letters, essays, and a rare interview, all edited by a contemporary biographer.

Fiche de lecture Les Bonnes de Jean Genet (analyse litteraire de reference et resume complet) (French, Paperback): Jean Genet Fiche de lecture Les Bonnes de Jean Genet (analyse litteraire de reference et resume complet) (French, Paperback)
Jean Genet
R223 Discovery Miles 2 230 Ships in 10 - 15 working days
Les Bonnes de Jean Genet (fiche de lecture et analyse complete de l'oeuvre) (French, Paperback): Jean Genet Les Bonnes de Jean Genet (fiche de lecture et analyse complete de l'oeuvre) (French, Paperback)
Jean Genet
R604 Discovery Miles 6 040 Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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