In September 1982, at the height of the civil war in Lebanon, global public opinion learns with horror about the massacres committed by the Christian Phalangists in Sabra and Shatila, the Palestinian camps in Beirut, with the tolerance of Israeli forces.

Jean Genet, who was in the Lebanese capital at that time, manages to visit the camps for a few hours the day after the massacre and, shaken, writes spontaneously one of his most important texts. Four Hours in Shatila is a unique report that combines journalistic testimony with the author's personal memories from the Palestinian camps in Jordan; the description of a hell on earth with the recollection of a lost paradise; political documentation with a political manifesto.

Here, the rejuvenating contact with a fighting youth meets the suffocating odor of unburied corpses. Thus, the juxtaposition of a landscape of brightness with a landscape of ash gives greater depth and drama to the Jordanian idyll and a sense of culmination to the memory of the author's brief visit to the site of the massacre.

Four Hours in Shatila is the first significant text by Genet after a 30-year hiatus from writing. Here, it is accompanied by a lengthy interview the author gave to Austrian radio, where many points of the text that would go unnoticed are addressed, while the reader has the opportunity to compare the author's written style with his spoken word.

[Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]