“Laure (1903-1938) was a revolutionary poet, masochist, Catholic rich girl, world traveler. Toward the end of her life she became the lover of French writer Georges Bataille. Her writings and her life story were remarkable in their violence and intensity, and her relationships with Bataille and Michel Leiris clearly influenced their works. This complete collection of writings published for the first time in English includes ‘Story of a Little Girl,’ about the Catholic priest who sexually molested her sister; ‘The Sacred,’ a collection of poems and fragments on mysticism and eroticism; notes on her association with Contre-Attaque and Acéphale, and her involvement with the Spanish Civil War and the early years of the Soviet Union; a compendium of correspondence with her beloved sister-in-law, and tortured love letters to Bataille; and an essay by Bataille about Laure’s death of tuberculosis at the age of 35.”

Publisher: City Lights
Paperback: 314 pages

“The entire Story of the Eye was woven in my mind out of two ancient and closely associated obsessions, eggs and eyes.” First published in 1928 under the pseudonym “Lord Auch,” this brilliantly lyrical pornographic novel from the young Bataille forecasts his later theories about ecstasy, death and transgression in the form of sharply obsessive fantasies of excess, ritualistic violence and sexual extremes. “Thus two globes of equal size and consistency had suddenly been propelled in opposite directions at once. One, the white ball of the bull, had been thrust into the ‘pink and dark’ cunt that Simone had bared in the crowd; the other, a human eye, had spurted from Granero’s head with the same force as a bundle of innards from a belly. This coincidence, tied to death and to a sort of urinary liquefaction of the sky, first brought us back to Marcelle in a moment that was so brief and almost insubstantial, yet so uneasily vivid that I stepped forward like a sleepwalker as though about to touch her at eye level.”

Publisher: City Lights
Paperback: 92 pages

The culmination of Bataille’s inquiries into the relationship between violence and the sacred. Taking up such figures as Gilles de Rais, Erzébet Báthory, the Marquis de Sade, El Greco, Gustave Moreau, André Breton, voodoo practitioners and Chinese torture victims, Bataille reveals their common obsession: death. This essay, illustrated with artworks from every era, examines the “little death” that follows sexual climax, the proximate death in sadomasochistic practices, and death as part of religious ritual and sacrifice.

Publisher: City Lights
Paperback: 213 pages
Illustrated