Ranging from Freud to Sade, this far-reaching and controversial study of the underlying sexual basis of religion and philosophy, especially in relation to death, includes the results of research into taboo, religious ecstacy and the erotic impulse.

A masterpiece of transgressive, surrealist erotica, George Bataille's Story of the Eye was the Fifty Shades of Grey of its era. This Penguin Modern Classics edition is translated by Joachim Neugroschal, and published with essays by Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes. Bataille's first novel, published under the pseudonym 'Lord Auch', is still his most notorious work. 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....

Through pre-war Europe, the narrator of this novel lurches despairingly from city to city in a surreal sexual and mental nightmare of squalor, sadism and drunken encounters.

These three short pieces of erotic prose fuse elements of sex and spirituality in a highly personal vision of the flesh. The book contains Bataille's own introductions as well as essays by Yukio Mishima and Ken Hollings.

'Literature is not innocent, ' stated Georges Bataille in this extraordinary 1957 collection of essays, arguing that only by acknowledging its complicity with the knowledge of evil can literature communicate fully and intensely. These literary profiles of eight authors and their work, including Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal and the writings of Sade, Kafka and Sartre, explore subjects such as violence, eroticism, childhood, myth and transgression, in a work of rich allusion and powerful argument.

"Georges Bataille (1897-1962) was an essayist, poet, novelist and philosopher of excess. His philosophy emerges from the aesthetic avant-garde of the 1920s and 30s, when he was associated with the surrealist movement, and has since been explored by the major figures of poststructuralism and postmodernism. His classic works include The Story of the Eye and The Accursed Share On Nietzsche takes up Nietzschean thought where Nietzsche left off - with the Death of God. Written against the backdrop of Germany under the Third Reich, the book explores the possibility of a spiritual life outside...

For Bataille, the absence of myth had itself become the myth of the modern age. In a world that had lost the secret of its cohesion, Bataille saw surrealism as both a symptom and a beginning of an attempt to address this loss. His writings on this theme are the result of a profound reflection in the wake of World War Two.

The Absence of Myth is the most incisive study yet made of surrealism, insisting on its importance as a cultural and social phenomenon with far-reaching consequences. Clarifying Bataille's links with the surrealist movement, and throwing revealing light on his...