Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #417549 in Books
• Published on: 2009-03-19
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 292 pages

About the Author
Jean Genet was born in Paris in 1910. An illegitimate child who never knew his parents, he was abandoned to the Public Assistance Authorities. He was ten when he was sent to a reformatory for stealing; thereafter he spent time in the prisons of nearly every country he visited in thirty years of prowling through the European underworld. With ten convictions for theft in France to his credit he was, the eleventh time, condemned to life imprisonment. Eventually he was granted a pardon by President Auriol as a result of appeals from France's leading artists and writers led by Jean Cocteau.$$$His first novel, Our Lady of the Flowers, was written while he was in prison, followed by Miracle of the Rose, the autobiographical The Thief's Journal, Querelle of Brest and Funeral Rites. He wrote six plays: The Balcony, The Blacks, The Screens, The Maids, Deathwatch and Splendid's (the manuscript of which was rediscovered only in 1993). Jean Genet died in 1986.

Customer Reviews

An important book for human beings
The beauty of this book is that it is written in a totally modernistic way, the writer engages you from the start describing his love of the degredation and violent homosexuality he endured and learnt to love, in his time in the children's home. It is an important book because it takes the most shocking of circumstances and turns them into a beautiful love story showing the endless triumph the beauty of the willing thug that is the ' miracle of the rose.' He describes a quite beautiful book that should make most modern writers of social realism wake up and examine the patronising angle they take on societies ill's and the dispossesed. Really, really heartbreakingly good.