Synopsis of The Blue Sky:

After the publication of three titles by Georges Bataille in The Vertical Smile, it is now the turn of another classic of erotic literature. Bataille wrote The Blue Sky in 1935, but, as he confesses in the preface, he ignored it for a long time. The war in Spain and the catastrophes that humanity had to endure for thirty years, he believed, had emptied the work of content. It was only in 1957, thanks to the advice of some friends, that the great French writer decided to release it to the public through JJ Pauvert, his publisher in France.

Despite the luminosity of the title, this work is inspired by the transgression of a prudent morality, in a dangerous quest: the learning of death, the “impossible” depth of that blue sky that attracts and repels us at the same time. London, Paris, Barcelona draw a topography of perdition, a picture in which Troppman, through drunkenness, empty nights and strange celebrations, approaches that new form of purity, of communion with death thanks to the illuminating discovery of the sordid.

It could be said that in The Blue Sky there is all of Bataille, all the themes that concerned him throughout his life: ideologies, death, states of ecstasy, sex... It has been thirteen years since we began publishing Georges Bataille. To date, six works have been published in different collections: The Real Bluebeard (Infimos 35), Eroticism (Marginales 61), History of the Eye, My Mother, Madame Edwarda followed by The Dead Man (The Smile verticals 10, 19 and 25) and The Tears of Eros (The Five Senses 12).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR OF AZUL DO CÉU

Georges Bataille was born in Billon, France, in 1897 and died in Malmaison in 1962. A man who liked to work in the shadows, he nevertheless became one of the most innovative and important European thinkers of the interwar period. He founded several magazines, including two that made history: Documents and Critique. He wrote essays such as La littérature et le mal, Eroticism (Marginales 61), L'expérience intérieure and La part maudite and, in the field of erotic narrative, extraordinary texts such as Histoire du être, Mi mamé followed by Les déceux homme, Madame Edwarda and The Blue of Heaven (The Vertical Smile 10, 19, 25 and 44). For him, all creation is a process by which man surpasses himself by transgressing all taboos, especially those related to eroticism and death.