Crazy Genie

A young girl clings fiercely to the damaged love of her mother--a taciturn farmworker cast out by her family and scorned by her village after giving birth out of wedlock--in this devastating and lyrically rendered novel from a French-Italian maverick.

Marie lives with her mother, Genie, in a ramshackle house by a willow-lined river in rural France. Every morning, Genie walks to the neighboring farms to do what work there is to be done. When farmers and villagers greet her, she says nothing, and keeps walking. Once, she was a lighthearted girl from the best family in the valley; now they all call her "Crazy Genie." While her mother works, Marie waits, yearning for her mother to notice her, longing for the moment when they will be back in their lonely house by the river.
Told in Marie's ingenuous, straightforward voice, Crazy Genie is the second novel by Inès Cagnati, who grew up in poverty in rural France in the 1940s, the child of Italian immigrant agricultural workers. Rich in observation and detail, and devastating in its portrayal of a child's unconditional love and of society's callous prejudices, Crazy Genie, together with her first novel, Free Day, confirms Cagnati's astonishing power as a writer.

Author: Inès Cagnati
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Published: 03/24/2026
Pages: 160
Binding Type: Paperback
ISBN13: 9798896230205
BISAC Categories:
- Fiction | Small Town & Rural
- Fiction | Family Life | General
- Fiction | Cultural Heritage

About the Author
Inès Cagnati (1937-2007) was born in Monclar, France, and died in Orsay. The child of Italian immigrants, she became a French citizen but never considered herself French. With a bachelor's degree in modern literature and a certificate for secondary-school instruction, she worked as a professor of literature at the Lycée Carnot in Paris. Cagnati was the author of four prize-winning books, including Free Day (NYRB Classics).

Liesl Schillinger is a literary critic, writer, and translator, and teaches journalism and criticism at the Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts of the New School for Social Research in New York City. For NYRB Classics, she translated Inès Cagnati's Free Day.