The Last Genet

The final decades of Jean Genet’s life were preoccupied with the struggles of the disenfranchised: the Black Panthers, Baader-Meinhoff, and the Palestinians. Laroche’s book is a careful philosophical and historical reading of these groups and Genet’s relation to them.

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.

The Criminal Child offers the first English translation of a key early work by Jean Genet. In 1949, in the midst of a national debate about improving the French reform-school system, Radiodiffusion Française commissioned Genet to write about his experience as a juvenile delinquent. He sent back a piece that was a paean to prison instead of the expected horrifying exposé. Revisiting the cruel hazing rituals that had accompanied his incarceration, relishing the special argot spoken behind bars, Genet bitterly denounced any improvement in the condition of young prisoners as a threat to their criminal souls. The radio station chose not to broadcast Genet’s views. “The Criminal Child” appears here with a selection of Genet’s finest essays, including his celebrated piece on the art of Alberto Giacometti.

The shattering novel of underground life the New York Times called “a cry of rapture and horror . . . the purest lyrical genius.” Jean Genet’s debut novel Our Lady of the Flowers, which is often considered to be his masterpiece, was written entirely in the solitude of a prison cell. A semi- autobiographical account of one man’s journey through the Paris demi-monde, dubbed “the epic of masturbation” by no less a figure than Jean-Paul Sartre, the novel’s exceptional value lies in its exquisite ambiguity.

A fictionalized account of the author's lover, Jean Decarin, who was killed in the Resistance during the liberation of Paris in World War II.

This nightmarish account of prison life during the German occupation of France is dominated by the figure of the condemned murderer Harcamone, who takes root and bears unearthly blooms in the ecstatic and brooding imagination of his fellow prisoner Genet.

This book is being planned as a tribute to Dr. Victor A. McKusick (1921-2008), who is well known as the “father of medical genetics”. He was long associated with the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, first as a student in the 1940s, and later as a faculty member, becoming the Chairman of the Department of Medicine at Johns Hopkins. He was a co-founder of GENOMICS and founder and lifelong editor of Mendelian Inheritance in Man, a massive compendium of human syndromes and genetic variants. Dr. McKusick made distinguished contributions to all branches of medical genetics. He was a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and many other academies in the world. He was awarded the National Medal of Science in 2002. He received many other honors including several honorary doctorates. The proposed book will reflect all the fields touched upon by Dr. McKusick’s contributions. It will be a valuable source of the latest progress in medical genetics. The contributors are internationally distinguished in their chosen specialties. Besides professional distinction, they are being selected because of their past association with Dr. McKusick, as former students or colleagues who extended his research in some fashion. The proposed book will reflect all the fields touched upon by Dr. McKusick’s contributions. It will be a valuable source of the latest progress in medical genetics. The contributors are internationally distinguished in their chosen specialties. Besides professional distinction, they are being selected because of their past association with Dr. McKusick, as former students or colleagues who extended his research in some fashion.

An engaging and challenging introduction to Jean Genet, this concise biography of the French writer and his work cuts directly to the intersection of thought and life that was essential to Genet's creativity. Arguing that Genet's life was an extraordinary spectacle in which the themes of his most revolutionary works were played out, Stephen Barber gives both the work and its singular inspiration in Genet's life their full due. Abandoned, arrested, and repeatedly incarcerated, Genet, who died in 1986, led a life that could best be described as a tour of the underworld of the twentieth century. Similarly, Genet's work is recognized by its nearly obsessive and often savage treatment of certain recurring themes. Sex, desire, death, oppression, domination-these ideas, central to Genet's artistic project, can be seen as preoccupations that arose directly from the artist's travels, imprisonments, sexual and emotional relationships, and political engagements and protests. This trenchant volume focuses directly on the moments in Genet's life in which those preoccupations are vividly projected in his novels, theater works, and film projects. Genet's works have been hugely influential for a vast array of writers, filmmakers, choreographers, and directors, especially at moments of social crisis; thus Genet's life is not only at the root of his own work but also that of many important artists of the twentieth century. With its frank and illuminating introduction by Edmund White, Jean Genet gives readers access to this brilliant and brutal mind.