Anaïs Nin

Sabina struggles to cope with her feelings of guilt as she loses herself in a series of different men

A Spy in the House of Love

1947-1955. 5

The Diary of Anaïs Nin

An account of Anais Nin's sexual awakening, this book describes her friendship with Henry Miller and his wife, June, and the fiery affair with Henry that liberated her sexually and morally, undermined her idealized marriage, and led her into psychoanalysis

From a Journal of Love : the Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931-1932

Henry and June

Henry Miller

This selection of letters from the correspondence of Henry Miller and Anais Nin documents twenty years of their fifty-year relationship--a relationship that began as a passionate love affair and grew to be an enduring friendship

Letters of Anais Nin and Henry Miller, 1932-1953

A Literate Passion

What did she expect of him? What was her quest? Did she have an unfulfilled desire?' Tales of transgressive desire and erotic adventure are recounted in these four shimmering pieces.

The Veiled Woman

“The genesis of House of Incest was in the dream. The keeping of dreams was an important part of that exploration of the unconscious. But I discovered dreams in themselves, isolated, were not always interesting. Very few of them had the complete imagery and tension to arouse others’ interest. They were fragmented. The surrealists delighted in the image themselves. This was satisfying to the painters and to the film-makers. But to the novelist concerned with human character dramas, they seemed ephemeral and vaporous. They had to be connected with life. It was psychoanalysis which revealed to me the constant interaction of dream and action. It was a phrase of Jung’s which inspired me to write House of Incest. He said: “Proceed from the dream outward.” In other words, it was essentially a matter of precedence. To capture the drama of the unconscious, one had to start with the key, and the key was the dream. But the novelist’s task was to pursue this dream, to unravel its meaning; the goal was to reach the relation of dream to life; the suspense was in finding this which led to a deeper significance of our acts. "Meanwhile a batch of dreams kept for a year served as a takeoff for House of Incest. They supplied the atmosphere, its climate and texture. At the same time I discovered that the dream had to be expanded, recreated, could not be told literally for then it became as flat and one-dimensional as representational realism. One had to find a language for it, a way of describing atmosphere, the colors and textures in which it moved. […]” "The dream taught me not only the delight of sensory images, but the fact, far more vital, that they led directly into this realm of the unconscious which Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Proust attained in various ways—Joyce by free association, with words, play on words, Proust by trusting the free associative process of memory and staying lingeringly in the realm between sleep and waking which resembles the waking dream, Virginia Woolf by accepting the vision of the poet as reality. House of Incest was, like a poem, visionary symbolic dream sequences which were woven together.” —Anaïs Nin, “The Novel of the Future,” (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986), 118–119 Originally published in 1936, House of Incest is Anais Nin's first work of fiction. The novel is a surrealistic look within the narrator's subconscious mind as she attempts to escape from a dream in which she is trapped, or in Nin's words, as she attempts to escape from "the woman's season in hell." In the documentary Anais Observed, Nin says House of Incest was based on dreams she'd had for more than a year.Nin's usage of the word incest in this case is metaphorical, not literal. In this book the word incest describes a selfish love where one can appreciate in another only that which is similar to oneself. One is then only loving oneself, shunning all differences. At first, such a self-love can seem ideal because it is without fear and without risk. But eventually it becomes a sterile nightmare.

House of Incest

Nin continues her debate on the use of drugs versus the artist's imagination, portrays many famous people in the arts, and recounts her visits to Sweden, the Brussels World's Fair, Paris, and Venice. "[Nin] looks at life, love, and art with a blend of gentility and acuity that is rare in contemporary writing" (John Barkham Reviews). Edited and with a Preface by Gunther Stuhlmann; Index.

The Diary of Anaïs Nin: 1939-1944

The acclaimed diarist and fictionist turns to the essay to explore and share her observations on men and women, writers, musicians, and film makers, and places of special appeal throughout the world

In Favor of the Sensitive Man, and Other Essays

Kim Krizan

Mirages opens at the dawn of World War II, when Anaïs Nin fled Paris, where she lived for fifteen years with her husband, banker Hugh Guiler, and ends in 1947 when she meets the man who would be “the One,” the lover who would satisfy her insatiable hunger for connection. In the middle looms a period Nin describes as “hell,” during which she experiences a kind of erotic madness, a delirium that fuels her search for love. As a child suffering abandonment by her father, Anaïs wrote, “Close your eyes to the ugly things,” and, against a horrifying backdrop of war and death, Nin combats the world's darkness with her own search for light. Mirages collects, for the first time, the story that was cut from all of Nin's other published diaries, particularly volumes 3 and 4 of The Diary of Anaïs Nin, which cover the same time period. It is the long-awaited successor to the previous unexpurgated diaries Henry and June, Incest, Fire, and Nearer the Moon. Mirages answers the questions Nin readers have been asking for decades: What led to the demise of Nin's love affair with Henry Miller? Just how troubled was her marriage to Hugh Guiler? What is the story behind Nin's “children,” the effeminate young men she seemed to collect at will? Mirages is a deeply personal story of heartbreak, despair, desperation, carnage, and deep mourning, but it is also one of courage, persistence, evolution, and redemption that reaches beyond the personal to the universal.

The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin 1939-1947

Mirages

The Diary of Anaïs Nin Volume 2 1934-1939

The Diary of Anais Nin Volume 1 1931-1934

Under a Glass Bell is one of Nin's finest collections of stories. First published in 1944, it attracted the attention of Edmond Wilson, who reviewed the collection in The New Yorker. It was in these stories that Nin's artistic and emotional vision took shape. This edition includes a highly informative and insightful foreword by Gunther Stuhlmann that places the collection in its historical context as well as illuminates the sequence of events and persons recorded in the diary that served as its inspiration. Although Under a Glass Bell is now considered one of Anaïs Nin's finest collections of stories, it was initially deemed unpublishable. Refusing to give up on her vision, in 1944 Nin founded her own press and brought out the first edition, illustrated with striking black-and-white engravings by her husband, Hugh Guiler. Shortly thereafter, it caught the attention of literary critic Edmund Wilson, who reviewed the collection in the New Yorker. The first printing sold out in three weeks. This new Swallow Press edition includes an introduction by noted modernist scholar Elizabeth Podnieks, as well as editor Gunther Stuhlmann's erudite but controversial foreword to the 1995 edition. Together, they place the collection in its historical context and sort out the individuals and events recorded in the diary that served as its inspiration. The new Swallow Press edition also restores the thirteen stories to the order Nin specified for the first commercial edition in 1948.

Under a Glass Bell and Other Stories

From the Back Cover: Anais Nin started her celebrated diary at the age of eleven, when she was immigrating to New York with her mother and two young brothers. It became her confidant, her beloved friend, in which she recorded her most intimate thoughts and kept watch on the state of her character. It gives a charming and amusing view of her early life, but it will be valued most for its self-portrait of an innocent girl who is transformed, through her own insights, into an enlightened young woman.

The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1914-1920

Linotte

In this “erotically charged”(Publishers Weekly) diary that picks up where Incest left off, Nin chronicles a restless search for fulfillment that leads her to New York City-”that brilliant giant toy” -then back to Paris and Henry, and eventually into the arms of a passionate new lover.

From "A Journal of Love" : the Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1934-1937

Fire

From influential feminist artist and essayist Anais Nin, Delta of Venus is one of the most important works of modern female erotica and "a joyous display of the erotic imagination" (The New York Times Book Review). Anais Nin pens a lush, magical world where the characters of her imagination possess the most universal of desires and exceptional of talents. Among these provocative stories, a Hungarian adventurer seduces wealthy women then vanishes with their money; a veiled woman selects strangers from a chic restaurant for private trysts; and a Parisian hatmaker named Mathilde leaves her husband for the opium dens of Peru. This is an extraordinarily rich and exotic collection from a master of erotic writing. "Inventive, sophisticated . . . highly elegant naughtiness."—Cosmopolitan

Erotica by Anaïs Nin

Delta Of Venus

"Djuna is a woman of forty with an unexplained fortune. A former ballet dancer, her only friends are associates from that world, men who tend to attract her by their least mature qualities. So when she meets seventeen-year-old Paul, she is stirred to her depths. Paul is in flight from his father, and she, for reasons buried in her past, needs the opposition of a father figure to sharpen her own desire." "Set against the cafe life of Montmartre, Children of the Albatross remains one of Nin's most poignant works, which delicately captures the nuances and half-dreamed sensations of adolescent love."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Children of the Albatross

The author reveals the experiences and associations of her extraordinary life and literary career in her personal journal

Anaïs Nin

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