Poetry. Drama. Translated from the French by Mark Spitzer. "Mark Spitzer has worked on these translations with a monastic patience and a martyr's zeal, and they require both ardor and dedication, since they are dense, heavily coded, daringly pornographic at times, and at other times far more lushly over-the-top than English comfortably tolerates.... No reader can truly understand Genet's plays or novels without grasping his poetry--which Mark Spitzer has made available in a convincing, accurate translation for the first time"--Edmund White. "A book with guts and integrity...a true work of scholarship and poetry...the quintessential English translation of the poems...plus impeccable translations of two groundbreaking posthumous plays [Splendid's Hotel and The Pope]"--The New Yorker.

"The most important translation of any French author to come out within the last half-century. Spitzer's translations are amazing!" --Rolling Stone