GENET: BORN TO LOSE

BORN TO LOSE is a brilliantly concise, stripped-down new biography of Jean Genet, the poet-thief and one of the 20th century’s most enduring gay literary icons.

After spending his early years as an itinerant criminal, Genet emerged in 1942 from a series of prison stays with the first of his extraordinarily subversive novels, Our Lady of the Flowers. Taken up by Cocteau and Sartre, Genet quickly became a legend to the underworld for his subsequent novels The Miracle of the Rose, Funeral Rites, Querelle of Brest and The Thief’s Journal, all of which fused sex with the celebration of crime.

BORN TO LOSE is a book written with profound empathy for his subject. Using aspects of Genet’s character as the building blocks to short chapters on his life and work, author Jeremy Reed explores Genet’s criminal activities, his addictions, his relationships with lovers and rent boys, his mercurial friendships with Cocteau, Sartre and Giacometti, his fugitive poetry, the obsession with death that underscores his work and the whole complex psychological make-up of a rebel born to lose, but in the process exploding into inimitably iconoclastic fiction.

Illustrated throughout.

Paperback. Size: 6 X 9 inches, 216 pages.