Books by M. Jean Genet

Translated by Bernard Frechtman and with an introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre (who famously hailed the novel as an 'epic of masturbation'), Our Lady of the Flowers was first written on brown paper in a French prison.

'It is the life of vermin that I am going to describe...' Part-autobiography, part-fiction, The Thief's Journal (1949) is an account of Jean Genet's impoverished travels across 1930s Europe, through Spain and Antwerp with bits of occasional border-hopping.

This novel is set in Paris in 1944 when the withdrawal of the occupying forces plunged the city into moral and physical chaos. Genet's other works include "Miracle of the Rose", "Querelle of Brest", "Our Lady of the Flowers" and "The Thief's Journal".

Querelle, a young sailor at large in the port of Brest, is an object of illicit desire to his diary-keeping superior officer Lieutenant Seblon. He is coveted, too, by corrupt policeman Mario. He gives himself freely both to brothel-keeper Madame Lysiane and to her husband. But Querelle is a thief and a murderer - not a man to be trusted.

Deathwatch, Jean Genet's earliest, shortest and most formally straightforward play, was first performed in Paris in 1949. It retains an intense power and makes an excellent introduction to his later dramas - The Maids, The Balcony, The Blacks, The Screens.

The 1966 staging in Paris of Jean Genet's The Screens by the Jean-Louis Barrault-Madeleine Renaud Company was highly controversial. This volume contains two essays by Genet, originally published in the French periodical Un Tel, giving his striking and highly personal views on life and art.

A play about the Algerian War of Independence, and it is an intricately crafted, grandiose construction - beguiling and baffling in equal measure.

The Maids (Les Bonnes, here translated by Bernard Frechtman) is Jean Genet's most oft-revived work for the stage. Genet's maids - Solange and Claire - occupy themselves, whenever their Madame is out of doors, by acting out ritualised fantasies of revenging their downtrodden status.

Splendid's, a two-act police thriller written in 1948, was never staged in Jean Genet's lifetime.