Fire: From "A Journal of Love" The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1934-1937
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In this “erotically charged”(Publishers Weekly) diary t...)
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.
(Auletris is a recently discovered, previously lost collec...)
Auletris is a recently discovered, previously lost collection of erotica by Anais Nin, consisting of two major sections: "Life in Provincetown" and "Marcel." A drastically cut version of "Marcel" appears in Nin's bestselling Delta of Venus, and "Life in Provincetown" has never been published until now. Written in the early 1940s for a collector at a dollar a page, the erotica was also given to agents to sell far and wide. Auletris was sold to Milton Lubovitsky in 1950; Lubovitsky typed up five copies and sold them under the imprint of Press of the Sunken Eye to private buyers under the table. One of these copies surfaced when it was being offered in an auction, and it was then discovered that this collection had been lost to the public for decades. Once the authorship was verified, it was readied for true publication. "Life in Provincetown" is a collection of interwoven stories set in one of Nin's favorite haunts and is populated with bohemian characters who engage in tabooed sexual behavior, all described in Nin's classic poetic prose. "Marcel" is another set of stories set mostly in Paris and is largely autobiographical, with many of the characters and situations taken directly from Nin's diaries. It is three times longer than the version in Delta of Venus and contains many lengthy passages, stories even, that were cut and never before published. Auletris is the first new Anais Nin collection of erotica since Little Birds in 1979.
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Evocative and superbly erotic, Little Birds is a powerf...)
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.
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This celebrated volume begins when Nin is about to publ...)
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 tuhlmann; Index.
A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller, 1932-1953
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The intimacy between Nin and Miller, first disclosed in...)
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.
Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love" -The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin (1931-1932)
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This bestseller covers a single momentous year during N...)
This bestseller covers a single momentous year during Nin’s life in Paris, when she met Henry Miller and his wife, June. “Closer to what many sexually adventuresome women experience than almost anything I’ve ever read....I found it a very erotic book and profoundly liberating” (Alice Walker). The source of a major motion picture from Universal. Preface by Rupert Pole; Index.
(The Portable Anais Nin is the first comprehensive collect...)
The Portable Anais Nin is the first comprehensive collection of the author's work in nearly 40 years, during which time her 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 prominent Nin scholar Benjamin Franklin V. Included are complete diary excerpts, entire fictional works, such as The House of Incest, erotica, interviews, selections from her unpublished diary, and her critical writings.
The Quotable Anais Nin: 365 Quotations with Citations
(365 quotations from the work of diarist/novelist Anais Ni...)
365 quotations from the work of diarist/novelist Anais Nin (1903-1977). The book is divided into five categories (Lust for Life, Love and Sensuality, Consciousness, Women and Men, Writing and Art) and contains validated citations (book title and page number). Anais Nin's ability to say the unsayable has made her one of the leading inspirational writers whose work has been quoted millions of time. The Quotable Anais Nin collects not only her most popular quotations, but those never published before as well.
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An extraordinarily rich and exotic collection from the ...)
An extraordinarily rich and exotic collection from the mistress of erotic writing
In Delta of Venus, 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.
Anaïs Nin was a French diarist and novelist. More important than her fame was her contribution to the genre of autobiography.
Background
Anaïs Nin was born on February 21, 1903 in Neuilly, France. She was the oldest child (and only daughter) of Joaquín Nin y Castellanos and Rosa Culmell de Nin, both musicians born in Cuba. Nin's father, who was studying music in Paris at the time of his daughter's birth, later became well known as a composer and concert pianist. The family lived in Germany, Cuba, and Belgium before Joaquín Nin abandoned his family in the south of France in 1913. Rosa took her three children to Barcelona before settling in New York City in 1914.
Education
Nin's schooling, both parochial and public, included only a few months of high school; she dropped out of Wadleigh High School in April 1919.
Career
The diary that Nin began when she was eleven years old, just before her arrival in New York City, grew over the next fifty years to some 35, 000 pages. She had what she called an "obsession with preserving, portraying, recording. " While living with her husband in Paris from 1925 to 1939, she filled a new diary volume at least every three months. She turned their home in Louveciennes, a forty-five-minute train ride from Paris, into a center of social and literary activity. She wrote short stories and a brief study of D. H. Lawrence, whom she credited with her sexual awakening. D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study (1932) caught the attention of Henry Miller. Nin had sexually awakening affairs with both Miller and (briefly) his wife, June, and she began acting out the Don Juan behavior of her father, culminating in a brief incestuous sexual liaison with him in 1933. During her eight-year affair with Miller, they shared a literary passion that would have a profound effect on both their lives and their work.
Nin grew as an artist, publishing The House of Incest (1936), a prose poem; and The Winter of Artifice (1939), three novellas; as well as the introduction to Miller's Tropic of Cancer (1934). All three books were published for Miller and Nin under the imprint of their Siana editions or Seurat series. This publishing venture, run by Jack Kahane's Obelisk Press, operated out of Miller's apartment in rue Villa Seurat and was financed by Nin. She also rented a houseboat on the Seine River in Paris, where she carried on an affair with (among others) Gonzalo More, a Peruvian Marxist. During the 1930's she also had close friendships with Antonin Artaud, Lawrence Durrell, René Allendy, and Otto Rank. The latter two men were her analysts and lovers.
She spent two periods of several months each in the years 1934-1935 working in New York City at Rank's analytical practice, experiences she used in "Hotel Chaotica" (published as "The Voice"). After fleeing the war in Europe at the end of 1939, Nin and Guiler settled in New York City. When the literary establishment shunned her poetic, abstract, introspective fiction, she bought her own printing press (Gemor Press).
With the assistance of Gonzalo More (who gave his name to the press), she began reprinting her first two volumes of fiction and new short stories entitled Under a Glass Bell (1944) and This Hunger (1945)--all illustrated by her husband ("Ian Hugo"). She also wrote erotica for a dollar a page, drawing on her own experiences and those of her friends--including More, Miller (who soon drifted to California), Eduardo Sanchez (a cousin), actress Luise Rainer, poet Robert Duncan, Caresse Crosby, and Gore Vidal. Both Vidal and a good review of her short stories by Edmund Wilson helped to secure her first trade publisher for a full-length novel. Children of the Albatross (1947), based on her circle of young gay artists in Greenwich Village, would become the first of five works in her "Proustian novel, " eventually titled Cities of the Interior.
By 1950, Nin had begun dividing her life between New York City, where she lived with her husband, and Los Angeles, where she lived with her second "husband, " Rupert William Pole, whom she had met in 1947. Pole, about fifteen years her junior, worked for the Forest Service before becoming a junior high school teacher. He often gave readings with Nin, who continued to publish novels: The Four-Chambered Heart (1950) concerns a love affair with a Marxist revolutionary on a houseboat in the Seine; A Spy in the House of Love (1954) follows numerous adulterous affairs of "Sabina" in New York City; and Seduction of the Minotaur (1961) is set in Acapulco, which had become Nin's favorite vacation spot. As the diary volumes grew, Nin was torn between her desire to publish them and her fear of hurting her husband and family. Occasionally an edited version of a portion of her diary was rejected by various publishers.
In addition to writing her diary and fiction, Nin wrote nonfiction essays, collected in The Novel of the Future (1968) and In Favor of the Sensitive Man (1976). She also acted in films, appearing in several of Ian Hugo's art films, including the first two, Ai-Ye (1950, twenty-two minutes) and Bells of Atlantis (1952, nine minutes). She also acted in Maya Deren's Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946) and Kenneth Anger's Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1950). After her final volume of fiction, Collages (1964), Nin began publishing The Diary of Anaïs Nin (seven volumes, 1966 - 1980). The first volume, which was rewritten and severely expurgated (no husband or sexual activities were included), began with her meeting Miller in the late fall of 1931. The appearance of her diaries, beginning in her sixty-third year, coincided with the rise of the women's movement and the Age of Aquarius, concerned with inner exploration and freedom. Nin articulated the Lawrentian world for women, an "obedience to the urge that arises in the soul" (as Lawrence called it). Nin's literary style was occasionally satirized in the national press, and her appearance was emulated by many.
Achievements
No woman has left such an extensive portrait of her inner life: her diary is the "first real portrait of the artist as a woman. "
The French house of Cacharel named a perfume for her (Anaïs, Anaïs), Gore Vidal wrote her into five of his novels, more than a dozen students have written doctoral dissertations on her work, and five books of criticism have appeared.
Long disillusioned with Catholicism, Nin took psychoanalysis as her religion.
Personality
Nin dressed dramatically in black, wore heavy makeup, and piled her hair above or behind her head. Lawrence Durrell called her a "diva. "
Connections
Nin married Hugh Parker Guiler on March 3, 1923, during a visit to Cuba. Guiler, a 1919 graduate of Columbia University, was a banker with National City Bank in New York, then in Paris and London, before returning to New York City during World War II. When he left his job with the bank more than a decade later, he changed his name to Ian Hugo and worked as a copper engraver and art-film maker, but continued to earn money as a financial adviser. Guiler and Nin were married for fifty-five years.
