A masterpiece of transgressive, surrealist erotica, George Bataille's Story of the Eye was the Fifty Shades of Grey of its era. [a] brilliant, exquisitely fetishistic tale of sexual agitaion'
New Statesman. '
His black masterpiece ...
If you enjoyed Story of the Eye, you might like Anais Nin's Delta of Venus, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.
Among his other works are the novels Blue of Noon (1957) and My Mother (1966), and the essays Eroticism (1957) and Literature and Evil (1957).
Leading a simple life as the curator of a municipal library, Bataille was involved on the fringes of Surrealism, founding the Surrealist magazine Documents in 1929, and editing the literary review Critique from 1946 until his death.
He converted to Catholicism, then later to Marxism, and was interested in psychoanalysis and mysticism, forming a secret society dedicated to glorifying human sacrifice.
Georges Bataille (1897-1962), French essayist and novelist, was born in Billom, France.
This edition also includes Susan Sontag's superb study of pornography as art, '
The Pornographic Imagination', as well as Roland Barthes' essay '
The Metaphor of the Eye'.
Yet it is also hallucinogenic in its power, and is one of the erotic classics of the twentieth century.
Shocking and sacrilegious, Story of the Eye is the fullest expression of Bataille's obsession with the closeness of sex, violence and death.
In this explicit pornographic fantasy, the young male narrator and his lovers Simone and Marcelle embark on a sexual quest involving sadism, torture, orgies, madness and defilement, culminating in a final act of transgression.
Bataille's first novel, published under the pseudonym '
Lord Auch', is still his most notorious work.
This Penguin Modern Classics edition is translated by Joachim Neugroschal, and published with essays by Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes.
A masterpiece of transgressive, surrealist erotica, George Bataille's Story of the Eye was the Fifty Shades of Grey of its era
