Translated by Philip A Facey.

'Along with Céline and Breton, Bataille writes as if he were dropping a bomb; in a fore-flash he creates a world of demented funereal sexuality.' Detroit Free Press

Told in a series of first-person accounts, L'Abbé C is a startling dissection of the intense and terrifying relationship between twin brothers, Charles and Robert. Charles is a modern libertine, dedicated to vice and depravity, while Robert is a priest so devout that he is nicknamed 'L'Abbé'. When the sexually wild Eponine intrudes upon their suffocating relationship, anguish, delirium and death ensue. With the skill of a master anatomist Bataille peels away the psychological intricacies of sex, faith and death in a provincial French town.

Georges Bataille was born in 1897 and died in 1962. A philosopher, novelist and critic, he has continued to exert an increasingly vital influence on today's literature and thought. His short novel Story of the Eye is now considered a major work 20th-century fiction.

'Bataille is one of the most important writers of the century. He broke with traditional narrative to tell us what has never been told before.' Michel Foucault

Other books by Georges Bataille also published by Marion Boyars are Blue of Noon, Eroticism, Literature and Evil, My Mother, Madame Edwarda and the Dead Man, and Story of the Eye.

Price: £9.95/$14.95
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0-7145-2848-X
Publication date: Summer, 2001