The Thief's Journal

Published in 1949, Jean Genet's autobiographical novel turns a vagabond life into a kind of dark liturgy. Genet drifts through Spain, France, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, and Poland between the wars, sleeping with sailors and soldiers, picking pockets, serving prison time. What sets the book apart is the prose. Genet refuses to apologize, explain, or sociologize. He treats betrayal, theft, and same-sex desire as aesthetic and even sacred categories, building a private theology of the outcast. Jean-Paul Sartre championed him, and the book influenced generations of queer and outsider writers from William S. Burroughs to Patti Smith to Hilton Als. It is not a beach read. It is a strange, beautiful, often difficult book that treats shame as material to be transmuted into art. A foundational text of postwar transgressive literature.

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Patti Smith

Singer-songwriter and author

AUG 2018

Every word written in The Thief's Journal is conscious, as stone by stone, Genet draws us into his triad of transgression, criminality, and betrayal, transfigured as love through his pen.

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