First published anonymously in France in 1928, Le Con d'lrene ("'Irene's Cunt") is the last 'lost' masterpiece of Surrealist erotica.
Like Georges Bataille's Story Of The Eye (published the same year), Irene's Cunt is an intensely poetic account, the story of a man's torment when he becomes fixated upon the genitalia of an imaginary woman and is reduced to voyeuristically scoping 'her' erotic encounters.
In between describing various events in brothels and other sexual adventures, Louis Aragon charts an inner monologue which is often reminiscent, in its poetic/surreal intensity, of the work of Lautréamont, and of Artaud in its evocation of physical disgust as the dark correlative to spiritual illumination.

This new edition features an exceptional and completely unexpurgated translation by Alexis Lykiard (translator of Lautréamont's Maldoror and Apollinaire's Les Onze Mille Verges), and includes complete annotation and an illuminating introduction.

"Dead dead dead so they're going to wake me up they wake me. Help me  waterfalls whirlwinds cyclones. The onyx the depths of mirrors the hole in the pupil mourning dirt photography sneaks crime ebony betel man-faced African sheep priestly rabble help me cuttlefish-ink smegma jiggers decayed teeth north winds plague help me excrement and melancholy thick snail-slime paranoia fear come to me from the hissing shadows from the cavalcades of conflagrations of coal-towns and the peatbogs and the stinking exhalations of railways in brick cities everything that resembles the cosmetics of moonless nights everything that tears apart in front of the eyes into spots into flies into cinders into mirages of death into howls into despair cachou-spittle crabs of liquorice rages magic residues muscats seals colloidal gold bottomless pit. Help me blackness."

"This work of genius... a lyrically urgent evocation of the mystical core of true sexual carnality." [Times Literary Supplement]

"In this little book, eroticism is plainly shown as opening directly out upon a certain vista of anguish, upon a certain lacerating consciousness of distress."  [Georges Bataille]