"The Criminal Child:Selected Essays" by Jean Genet (NYRB)iI

ISBN: 978-68137-361-4

Those who write and look up to other writers (as a writer should, by the way), I have to imagine Jean Genet is very much 'it.'  As a teenager and a young man in his twenties, I greatly admired Yukio Mishima and Genet.  In no fashion was I going to idolize Robert Benchley (that happened in my 50s) or any writer that appeared on the New York Times Bestseller List.   Genet is a criminal.  And a proud criminal on top of that.   In our world now, criminal writers are looked down upon.  As you gather, a writer has to be, at the very least, a morally upstanding citizen.  Genet is bad-ass.  But a bad-ass that can write about his world in such delicious language.  One of the great presses in the English language is the New York Review of Books (NYRB), and their edition of Genet's "The Criminal Child: Selected Essays is a small and remarkable book.  The title piece is regarding the nature of the French reform-school system, and how much Genet preferred the kiddie-prison of his youth.  Also, his essays/commentary on the visual art of Alberto Giacometti and Leonor Fini is superb. Genet can connect to an artist like a hand attached to an arm.