' Literature is not innocent' stated Georges Bataille in this extraordinary 1957 collection of essays arguing that only by acknowledging its complicity with the knowledge of evil can literature communicate fully & intensely These literary profiles of eight authors & their work including Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal & the writings of Sade Kafka & Sartre explore subjects such as violence eroticism childhood myth & transgression in a work of rich allusion & powerful argument