Why read The Thief's Journal?

Book cover of The Thief's Journal

Book description

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…

Explore

Topics

Genres

Literary fiction

When you buy books, we may earn a commission that helps keep our lights on (or join the rebellion as a member).

Why read it?

2 authors picked The Thief's Journal as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

James Hannaham

Author

Genet’s prose really kicks a lot of others to the curb, even in translation, and the curb is where he is most comfortable. To paraphrase Wilde, he was definitely in the gutter but looking at the stars.

His visionary, unabashed grit, queer defiance, and uncanny lyrical ability really should make him required reading for everyone. But if you’re a defiant freak, you get mixed up in the prison system, and you need a North Star, you can’t do much better than Genet, a beautiful, wild thinker about all things related to the place of punishment and jails in society.

He…

From James' list on The best books for and about convicts and ex-convicts.

Simon Marlowe

Author

The French have a peculiar sadomasochism, where they venerate the destitute, elevate them to romantic icons, and then wait to be spat on, by the very thing they applaud. This is Genet in a nutshell, a bourgeois-hating novelist and playwright (who makes Joe Orton sound like an infantile literary masturbator), who got around to putting his life down on paper with this novel, The Thief’s Journal. It is post-Celine, and predates Dirty Realism, and has caustic revelations of a petty criminal. He finds virtue in the sewers of Paris and Europe, like a Phantom dwelling artist whose dishonesty is…

From Simon's list on The best novels that reveal society as a gaping pus-ridden bedsore.