Bataille’s short, notorious novel, made up of an obsessive circulation of images (the eye, the egg, the sun) pushed through sex, violence, and sacrilege until they begin to collapse into one another.

Written under a pseudonym in 1928 and long treated as illicit or marginal, Story of the Eye now sits more clearly as a key text in Bataille’s wider project: an attempt to locate experience at its limit, where desire becomes indistinguishable from transgression, and meaning breaks under pressure.

It’s not erotic in any conventional sense; it’s closer to a philosophical experiment conducted through the body.

Penguin Modern Classics paperback edition (reprint; exact printing unspecified). Clean, presentable copy with light general wear; no major faults visible.