Georges Bataille, French essayist and novelist, was born in 1897. He converted to Catholicism, then to Marxism, and was interested in psychoanalysis and mysticism. As curator of the municipal library in Orleans, he led a relatively simple life, although he became involved, usually on the fringes, with the surrealist movement. He founded the literary review Critique in 1946, which he edited until his death in 1962, and was also a founder of the review Documents, which published many of the leading surrealist writers. His writing is a mixture of poetry and philosophy, fantasy and history, and his first novel, Story of the Eye, was written under the pseudonym of Lord Auch. Bataille's other works include the novels Blue of Noon and L'Abbé C, and the volumes of essays Eroticism and Literature and Evil.Michael Richardson is a widely published critic, editor, and translator of works on surrealism including Georges Bataille's The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism. Other books he has edited and/or translated include Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean and The Dedalus Book of Surrealism (The Identity of Things). Currently he is a visiting fellow in the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London.

One of the most original and unsettling of those thinkers who, in the wake of Sade and Nietzsche, have confronted the possibility of thought in a world that has lost its myth of transcendence.