A volume of iconic Surrealist photographs exemplifying convulsive beauty, accompanied by the theoretical and poetic texts Bellmer wrote between the 1930s and the 1960s. It is the first complete English translation of the doll writings from his final German version, and incorporates previously untranslated material. In these texts Bellmer weaves together psychology, mathematics, anagrams, chance, the laws of optics, the fourth dimension and hermaphroditism, together with the marvellous and intuition, into a theory of eroticism: his prose is a cross between poem, memoir, manifesto and philosophical treatise on how the body is perceived. The book also includes a suite of poems by Paul Éluard.