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.
Patti Smith has written a new introduction for The Thief's Journal, Jean Genet's most autobiographical novel-which follows the years he spent as a vagrant and petty criminal-hailed by Jean-Paul Sartre as Genet's "most beautiful book"
PRAISE FOR THE THIEF'S JOURNAL
"One of the strongest and most vital accounts of a life ever set down on paper . . . Genet has dramatized the story of his own life with a power and vision which take the breath away . . . [he is] one of the most daring literary figures of all time." -
New York Post
"Genet is one of those creatures who sum up or express the potentialities of an entire species or form even as its life is passing from it . . . one of the most striking things about Genet's work, and especially
The Thief's Journal, is the consciousness with which it is suffused." -
Steven Marcus, New York Review of Books
"Only a handful of twentieth-century writers, such as Kafka and Proust, have as important, as authoritative, as irrevocable a voice and style." -
Susan Sontag
