Anaïs Nin

Four-volume set contains the diaries covering 1931-1947, edited with prefaces by Gunther Stuhlmann.

« J’ai toujours senti cet élan en moi, comparable à celui des plantes pour grandir. Nous possédons tous cet élan, mais il arrive qu’il se brise. Nous avons tous nos empêchements, nos découragements, nos traumatismes. Il s’agit seulement de savoir à quel point nous désirons nous battre afin de surmonter les obstacles. »Dans cette série d’entretiens et de lectures prononcées par Anaïs Nin devant des étudiants entre 1966 et 1973, l’écrivaine nous livre, à la fin de sa vie, une réflexion très personnelle sur divers sujets : la recherche de l’identité, la magie de l’art, la femme et le féminisme… Plus qu’un ouvrage thématique, c’est une synthèse de sa pensée que nous offrent ces textes, empreints d’un constant optimiste, et qui constituent une véritable porte d’entrée privilégiée pour découvrir celle qui marqua son époque par des ouvrages incontournables. Établi et présenté par Evelyn J. Hinz. Traduit de l’anglais (États-Unis) par Béatrice Commengé.

The Four-Chambered Heart , Anaïs Nin’s 1950 novel, recounts the real-life affair she conducted with café guitarist Gonzalo Moré in 1936. Nin and Moré rented a house-boat on the Seine, and under the pervading influence of the boat’s watchman and Moré’s wife Helba, developed a relationship. Moré; named the boat Nanankepichu , meaning "not really a home."In the novel, which Nin drew from her experiences on the boat, the characters are clearly based. Djuna is an embodiment of Nin herself. A young dancer in search of fulfillment, she encapsulates all that the author was striving for at that time. The character of Djuna features in other novels, perhaps weaving a directly autobiographical thread into Nin’s fiction. The gypsy musician, Rango, is therefore Moré, and his invalid wife is Zora. The old watchman is present as a force which, along with Zora, works against the lovers in their quest for happiness.Nin’s main concern is the "outside," and how it affects the "interior." Water is a cleverly used theme. “I have no great fear of depths,” says Djuna, “and a great fear of shallow living.” Rango and Djuna’s relationship is, in effect, their effort to remain afloat. Often, Nin employs a stream of consciousness, especially in her flowing analyses of love, life and music, which continues the water image.Anaïs Nin’s writing is typically exquisite in its detail and texture. She describes its "black lacquered cobblestones" and "silver filigree trees." The "humid scarfs of fog" on the river, and "the sharp incense of roasted chestnuts" reveal their source through their Nin’s personal experience.

Fifteen short stories by Anaïs Nin published posthumously in 1977 - though largely written in the 1940s as erotica for a private collector. In Delta of Venus Anaïs Nin penned 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. Delta of Venus is an extraordinarily rich and exotic collection from the master of erotic writing.Part of the Quality Paperback Book Club series with limited-edition art cover. Cover art painted by Monica Elias.

Taken from the original, uncensored journals of Anaïs Nin, Henry and June spans a single year in Nin's life when she discovers love and torment in one insatiable couple. From late 1931 to the end of 1932, Nin falls in love with Henry Miller's writing and his wife June's striking beauty. When June leaves Paris for New York, Henry and Anaïs begin a fiery affair that liberates her sexually and morally, but also undermines her marriage and eventually leads her into psychoanalysis. As she grapples with her own conscience, a single question dominates her thoughts: What will happen when June returns to Paris? An intimate account of one woman's sexual awakening, Henry and June exposes the pain and pleasure felt by a single person trapped between two loves.

Evocative and superbly erotic, Little Birds is a powerful journey into the mysterious world of sex and sensuality. From the beach towns of Normandy to the streets of New Orleans, these thirteen vignettes introduce us to a covetous French painter, a sleepless wanderer of the night, a guitar-playing gypsy, and a host of others who yearn for and dive into the turbulent depths of romantic experience.

Although Anais Nin found in her diaries a profound mode of self-creation and confession, she could not reveal this intimate record of her own experiences during her lifetime. Instead, she turned to fiction, where her stories and novels became artistic "distillations" of her secret diaries. A Spy in the House of Love, whose heroine Sabina is deeply divided between her drive for artistic and sexual expression, on the one hand, and social restrictions and self-created inhibitions, on the other, echoed Nin's personal struggle with sex, love, and emotional fragmentation. Written when Nin's own life was taut with conflicting loyalties, her protagonist Sabina repeatedly asks herself, can one indulge in one's sensual restlessness, the fantasies, the relentless need for adventure without devastating consequences?

This celebrated volume begins when Nin is about to publish her first book and ends when she leaves Paris for New York. Edited and with a Preface by Gunther Stuhlmann.

With an introduction by Allison Pease, this new edition of House of Incest is a lyrical journey into the subconscious mind of one of the most celebrated feminist writers of the twentieth-century. Originally published in 1936, House of Incest is Anaïs Nin’s first work of fiction. Based on Nin’s dreams, the novel is a surrealistic look within the narrator’s subconscious as she attempts to distance herself from a series of all-consuming and often taboo desires she cannot bear to let go. The incest Nin depicts is a metaphor—a selfish love wherein a woman can appreciate only qualities in a lover that are similar to her own. Through a descriptive exploration of romances and attractions between women, between a sister and her beloved brother, and with a Christ-like man, Nin’s narrator discovers what she thinks is that a woman’s most perfect love is of herself. At first, this self-love seems ideal because it is attainable without fear and risk of heartbreak. But in time, the narrator’s chosen isolation and self-possessed anguish give way to a visceral nightmare from which she is unable to wake.

Beginning with Nin's arrival in New York, this volume is filled with the stories of her analytical patients. There is a shift in emphasis also as Nin becomes aware of the inevitable choice facing the artist in the modern world. "Sensitive and frank...[Nin's] diary is a dialogue between flesh and spirit" (Newsweek). Edited and with a Preface by Gunther Stuhlmann; Index.

The intimacy between Nin and Miller, first disclosed in Henry and June, is documented further in this impassioned exchange of letters between the two controversial writers. Edited and with an Introduction by Gunther Stuhlmann; Index.

'What did she expect of him? What was her quest? Did she have an unfulfilled desire?'Transgressive desires and sexual encounters are recounted in these four pieces from one of the greatest writers of erotic fiction.Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

This candid volume from the renowned diarist covers her years of struggle, and eventual triumph, as an author in America during World War II.

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.

Few writings explore a woman's love life in such detail, with such subtlety, insight, and pain, as does Anais Nin's original, uncensored diary. It is a life record that deals openly with the physical aspects of relationships and unsparingly with the full spectrum of psychological ramifications. Here was a woman who sought the freedom to act out her sexual and emotional desires with the same guiltless, "amoral" abandon that men have always claimed for themselves. When Nin began publishing sections of her diary in 1966, this aspect of her life was excised, though clearly there was more than could be told at the time concerning her relationships with Henry Miller and his wife, June, with the writer and actor Antonin Artaud, with her analysts Rene Allendy and Otto Rank, and - most important - with her father. Here now is the previously missing portion of Nin's life in the crucial years from 1932 to 1934, the shattering psychological drama that drove her to seek absolution from her psychoanalysts for the ultimate transgression. In its raw exposure of a woman's struggle to come to terms with herself, to find salvation in the very act of writing, Incest unveils an Anais Nin without masks and secrets, yet in the end still mysterious, perhaps inexplicable.

Anaïs Nin's Ladders to Fire interweaves the stories of several women, each emotionally inhibited in her own way: through self-doubt, fear, guilt, moral drift, and distrust. The novel follows their inner struggles to overcome these barriers to happiness and wholeness. The author's own experiences, as recorded in her famous diaries, supplied the raw material for her fiction. It was her intuitive, experimental, and always original style that transformed one into the other. Nin herself memorably claimed that "it was the fiction writer who edited the diary."Ladders to Fire is the first book of Nin's continuous novel, Cities of the Interior, which also includes Children of the Albatross, The Four-Chambered Heart, A Spy in the House of Love, and Seduction of the Minotaur. These loosely interlinked stories develop the characters and themes established in the first volume, leading slowly toward a resolution of inner turmoil and conflict.This Swallow Press reissue of Ladders to Fire includes a new introduction by Nin scholar Benjamin Franklin V, as well as Gunther Stuhlmann's classic foreword to the 1995 edition.

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.

The author's experiences in Greenwich Village, where she defends young writers against the Establishment, and her trip across the country in an old Ford to California and Mexico. "[Nin is] one of the most extraordinary and unconventional writers of this century" (New York Times Book Review). Edited and with a Preface by Gunther Stuhlmann; Index.

Collages explores a world of fantasy and dreams through an eccentric young painter. A radical work in its time (1964), Anais Nin dispensed with normal structural convention and allowed her characters to wander freely in space and time in an attempt to describe life with the disconnected clarity of a dream in which hip and freakish lives intersect or merge.Perhaps reflecting a developing contemporary awareness of abstract art, Collages is a series of impressions rather than a coherent whole, a shifting notebook indelibly inscribed with Nin's humour, invention and unrivalled gift for sensuous description."A handful of perfectly told fables" -- Times Literary Supplement

The author's experiences in Mexico, California, New York, and Paris, her psychoanalysis, and her experiment with LSD. "Through her own struggling and dazzling courage [Nin has] shown women groping with and growing with the world" (Minneapolis Tribune). Edited and with a Preface by Gunther Stuhlmann; Index.

Here, in more than twenty essays, Nin shares her unique perceptions of people, places, and the arts. Includes several lectures and two interviews.

Children of the Albatross is divided into two "The Sealed Room" focuses on the dancer Djuna and a set of characters, chiefly male, who surround her; "The Caf�" brings together a cast of characters already familiar to Nin's readers, but it is their meeting place that is the focal point of the story.As always, in Children of the Albatross, Nin's writing is inseparable from her life. From Djuna's story, told in "The Sealed Room" through hints and allusions, hazy in their details and chronology, the most important event to emerge is her father's desertion (like Nin's) when she was sixteen. By rejecting realistic writing for the experience and intuitions she drew from her diary, Nin was able to forge a novelistic style emphasizing free association, spontaneity, and improvisation, a technique that finds its parallel in the jazz music performed at the caf� where Nin's characters meet.

Sexually frank stories describe Paris in the 1930s, sexual rivals, frustrated wives, a famous prostitute, and a woman's sexual awakening

“Some voyages have their inception in the blueprint of a dream, some in the urgency of contradicting a dream. Lillian’s recurrent dream of a ship that could not reach the water, that sailed laboriously, pushed by her with great effort, through city streets, had determined her course toward the sea, as if she would give this ship, once and for all, its proper sea bed…. With her first swallow of air she inhaled a drug of forgetfulness well known to adventurers.”Seduction of the Minotaur is the fifth and final volume of Anaïs Nin’s continuous novel known as Cities of the Interior. First published by Swallow Press in 1961, the story follows the travels of the protagonist Lillian through the tropics to a Mexican city loosely based on Acapulco, which Nin herself visited in 1947 and described in the fifth volume of her Diary. As Lillian seeks the warmth and sensuality of this lush and intriguing city, she travels inward as well, learning that to free herself she must free the “monster” that has been confined in a labyrinth of her subconscious. This new Swallow Press edition includes an introduction by Anita Jarczok, author of Inventing Anaïs Nin: Celebrity Authorship and the Creation of an Icon. Swallow Press publishes all five volumes that make up Cities of the Interior: Ladders to Fire, Children of the Albatross, The Four-Chambered Heart, A Spy in the House of Love, and Seduction of the Minotaur.

Three * Stella * Winter of Artifice and* The Voice"A handful of perfectly fold fables, and prose which is so daringly elaborate, so accurately timed...using words as magnificently colorful, evocative and imagist as any plastic combination on canvas but as mysteriously idiosyncratic as any abstract." - Times Literary Supplement

مرت ثلاث دقائق منذ رحيلك. لا, لا أستطيع حبس هذا أكثر. سأخبرك بما تعرفينه مسبقاً -أحبك. هذا ما كنت أدمّره مرة بعد أخرى.أناييس, لا أستطيع التحدث كثيراً - أنا مصاب بالحمى. كنت أتحدث معك نادراً لأنني كنت باستمرار على وشك أن أقف وأحتضنك. كنت آمل ألا تذهبي إلى المنزل للعشاء - لنتمكن من الذهاب معاً لتناول بعض الطعام والرقص. أنت ترقصين - لقد حلمت بهذا مرات عديدة - أنا أرقص معكِ, أو أنتِ ترقصين وحدك وتتركين رأسك للخلف وعينيك نصف مغمضتين. لا بد وأنك سترقصين لي بهذة الطريقة. هذة روحك الإسبانيّة - دمك الأندلسي المقطّر.

Ladders to Fire , Children of the Albatross , The Four-Chambered Heart , A Spy in the House of Love , Seduction of the Minotaur . Haunting and hypnotic, these five novels by Anaïs Nin began in 1946 to appear in quiet succession. Though published separately over the next fifteen years, the five were conceived as a continuous experience—a continuous novel like Proust’s, real and flowing as a river. The full impact of Anaïs Nin’s genius is only to be found through reading the novels in context and in succession. They form a rich, luminous tapestry whose overall theme Nin has called “woman at war with herself.” Characters, symbols appear and now one, now another unfolding, gradually revealing, changing, struggling, growing, and Nin had forged an evocative language all her own for the telling. “The diary taught me that there were no neat ends to novels, no neat denouement, no neat synthesis,” she explains. “So I began an endless novel, a novel in which the climaxes consisted of discoveries in awareness, each step in awareness becoming a stage in the growth like the layers in trees.” Cities of the Interior fulfills a long–time desire on the part of readers, publisher, and Anaïs Nin herself to reunite the five novels in a single volume.

NIN INÉDITALa mejor introducción a la obra de una autora admirada por lectores y escritores de ayer y de hoy: dieciséis relatos apasionantes UNO DE LOS MEJORES LIBROS DE 2021 SEGÚN EL INDEPENDIENTE «Antes de Lena Dunham, estuvo Anaïs Nin.»Sady Doyle, The Guardian «Mujer loca y sabia. [...] Esa literatura marginal que cada día me parece más bella.»Julio Cortázar Estoy cansada de buscar una filosofía que concuerde conmigo y con mi mundo, quiero buscar un mundo que concuerde conmigo y con mi filosofía. Escritos cuando tenía unos veinticinco años y vivía en Francia con su marido, el poeta y banquero norteamericano Hugh Parker Guiler, estos dieciséis relatos inéditos en castellano sorprenden por sumadurez y frescura, a la vez que muestran ya los dos elementos que luego se afianzarían en su obra —la ironía y el feminismo— y también sus obsesiones —el deseo femenino, la sexualidad, el adulterio, la belleza y el retrato de una masculinidad tan deslumbradora como tóxica—. Algunas de estas historias están protagonizadas por claros alter ego de Nin; otras, por apasionadas bailarinas de flamenco, misteriosos extranjeros, músicos... Poco después de escribir estos cuentos, Nin conocerá a Henry Miller, que diría de ella: «Cuando trato de imaginar de quién es deudor tu estilo, me siento frustrado, no recuerdo a nadie con el que tengas el más ligero parecido. Me recuerdas únicamente a ti misma». Melancólicos y punzantes, revelan ya a una gran autora que hizo saltar por los aires las convenciones literarias y sociales de su época. La crítica ha dicho:«En estos escritos vemos las ganas de comerse el mundo [de Anaïs], descubrimos su imaginación desbordante y también su ingenuidad -incluso el miedo a ella misma-. Nos llevan al comienzo de todo: de su ironía, de su sexo y de conocerse como mujer. Relatos breves, pero poderosos, [...] melancólicos y punzantes. Ahí comenzó la gran autora que hizo saltar por los aires las convenciones literarias y sociales de su época.»Susana Santaolalla, El Ojo Crítico «[Nin] tiene perlas aún desconocidas en castellano. Estos relatos [...] son el embrión de una escritora que explotaría muy poco tiempo después.»Paula Corroto, El Confidencial «Fue antes de probarlo todo. Aquí hay ganas, imaginación. [...] Es el principio de su pensamiento fuerte y revolucionario; de su escritura feroz. También de su feminismo desbocado; del deseo, la belleza, el adulterio.»Loreto Sánchez Seoane, El Independiente «Con un cierto aire onírico y psicoanalítico y un inconfundible ambiente de los locos años veinte y de la sensibilidad surrealista, en los nuevos relatos [...] hay pulsiones artísticas, atracción, mujeres jóvenes seductoras que aún no son del todo conscientes de su poder. [...] Valiosos e inspiradores.»Andrea Aguilar, El País «Su prosa es tan elaborada, atrevida y precisa que no sería descabellado compararla con Proust.»The Times Literary Supplement «Una de las escritoras más extraordinarias y poco convencionales de este siglo.»Anna Balakian, The New York Times «Qué genial es la ficción erótica de Anaïs Nin.»Emma Cline «Si hay una autora que fue a través de la escritura, en quien vida y literatura son del todo inseparables, es Anaïs Nin.»Najat El Hachmi, El Periódico «Lo único que he releído en mi vida han sido los diarios de Anaïs Nin.»Björk

A charming and amusing view of Nin's early life, from age eleven to seventeen; the self-portrait of an innocent girl who is transformed, through her own insights, into an enlightened young woman. "An enchanting portrait of a girl's constant search for herself" (Library Journal). Preface by Joaquin Nin-Culmell; Index; photographs and drawings. Translated by Jean L. Sherman.

The Portable Anaïs Nin is not only the first anthology of the author’s work to appear digitally, it is also the first comprehensive collection in nearly 40 years, during which time the Nin catalogue has doubled with the release of the erotica and unexpurgated diaries. A handy source book of Nin's most important writings, arranged chronologically and annotated by Nin scholar Benjamin Franklin V.

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 final volume ends as the author wished-not with her last two years of pain but at a joyous, reflective moment on a trip to Bali. "One of the most remarkable diaries in the history of letters" (Robert Kirsch, Los Angeles Times). Edited and with a Preface by Gunther Stuhlmann; Index; photographs.