Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Thief

The Thief

Darien, Georges
Houis, Jacques
Breton, André

Paperback

Mystery & ThrillerGeneral Fiction

Publisher Price: $19.95

PREORDER - Expected ship date January 19, 2027

ISBN10: 1681378124
ISBN13: 9781681378121
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Published: Jan 19 2027
Pages: 400
Weight: 0.81
Language: English
Made into a 1967 film by Louis Malle and never before available in English, this classic of anarchist literature follows a once well-to-do young man forced into an itinerant life of crime.

The Thief is a picture of the sleezy underbelly of the Belle Époque, a broadside fired against the corruptions of power and privilege. Written by the anarchist activist Georges Darien (a pseudonym that can be translated as Lord Nothing), it found almost no readers when it came out at the end of the nineteenth century, though Alfred Jarry embraced it as one of his favorite books.

Over the years, however, this picaresque masterpiece with shades of black comedy has found a growing number of admirers, from the surrealist capo dei capi André Breton to Lucy Sante. It is a book of wild, comic, profane energy that, in its luxuriant nihilism, anticipates Céline's Journey to the End of Night.

Georges Randal is the titular thief, a young Frenchman of good family who, having been deprived of his inheritance by a conniving uncle, takes to a life of crime. Moving between London, Brussels, and Paris, in a world of hookers, drifters and grifters, revolutionaries and politicians, bankers and thieves, he is in a position to reveal modern society in all its teeming corruption.

The thief is no hero. Like everyone else in this decadent society, he is a trafficker and exploiter--and a wounded soul. At least, however, he has the courage of his disaffection, his fury warmed by self-hatred. And he does seem a somewhat distant cousin of Robin Hood, targeting the wealthy and helping the needy when the opportunity arises.

After more than a hundred years, Georges Darien's vision of our fallen modern world--the inhuman comedy he proposed to set beside Balzac's human one--seems especially pertinent to our current Gilded Age. Jacques Houis's new translation is the first ever into English.

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