Story of the Eye

In 1928, Georges Bataille published this first novel under a pseudonym, a legendary shocker that uncovers the dark side of the erotic by means of forbidden obsessive fantasies of excess and sexual extremes. A classic of pornographic literature, Story of the Eye finds the parallels in Sade and Nietzsche and in the investigations of contemporary psychology; it also forecasts Bataille's own theories of ecstasy, death and transgression which he developed in later work.

Dovid Bergelson, one of the most renowned and influential writers of the 1900s, was born in Ocrimovo, Ukraine, in 1884. In 1952, at the age of 68, after four years of prison, he died a victim of Stalin's police. His work as a writer and literary man spans a period of approximately thirty years.