Now in paperback, The Crime of Jean Genet is a powerful personal account of the influence of one writer on another and one of the most penetrating explorations yet of Genet’s work and achievement.

Dominique Eddé met novelist and playwright Jean Genet in the 1970s. And she never forgot him. “His presence,” she writes, “gave me the sensation of icy fire. Like his words, his gestures were full, calculated, and precise. . . . Genet’s movements mimicked the movement of time, accumulating rather than passing.”

This book is Eddé’s account of that meeting and its ripples through her years of engaging with Genet’s life and work. Rooted in personal reminiscences, it is nonetheless much broader, offering a subtle analysis of Genet’s work and teasing out largely unconsidered themes, like the absence of the father, which becomes a metaphor for Genet’s perpetual attack on the law. Tying Genet to Dostoevsky through their shared fascination with crime, Eddé helps us more clearly understand Genet’s relationship to France and Palestine, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, the theater, and even death.  A powerful personal account of the influence of one writer on another, The Crime of Jean Genet is also one of the most penetrating explorations yet of Genet’s work and achievement.

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.