2015 Reprint of 1961 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition. Not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. "Tropic of Cancer" has been described as "notorious for its candid sexuality" and as responsible for the "free speech that we now take for granted in literature." It was first published in 1934 by the Obelisk Press in Paris, France, but this edition was banned in the United States. Its re-publication in 1961 in the U.S. by Grove Press led to obscenity trials that tested American laws on pornography in the early 1960s. In 1964, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the book...

Children of the Albatross is divided into two sections: "The Sealed Room" focuses on the dancer Djuna and a set of characters, chiefly male, who surround her; "The Cafe" 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...

"Collages began with an image which had haunted me. A friend, Renate, had told me about her trip to Vienna where she was born, and of her childhood relationships to statues. She told me stories of her childhood, her relationship to her father, her first love. I begin the novel with: Vienna was the city of statues. They were as numerous as the people who walked the streets. They stood on the top of the highest towers, law down on stone tombs, sat on horseback, kneeled, prayed, fought animals and wars, danced, drank wine and read books made of stone. They adorned cornices like the figureheads...

In 1932, two years after D. H. Lawrence's death, a young woman wrote a book about him and presented it to a Paris publisher. She recorded the event in her diary: It will not be published and out by tomorrow, which is what a writer would like when the book is hot out of the oven, when it is alive within oneself. He gave it to his assistant to revise. The woman was Anais Nin.
Nin examined Lawrence's poetry, novels, essays, and travel writing. She analyzed and explained the more important philosophical concepts contained in his writings, particularly the themes of love, death, and religion,...

"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 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 and social restrictions and self-created inhibitions, echoes Nin's personal struggle with sex, love, and emotional fragmentation. Written when Nin's own life was taut with conflicting...

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. She had landed in the city of Golconda, where the sun painted everything with gold, the lining of her thoughts, the worn valises, the plain beetles, Golconda of the golden age, the golden aster, the golden eagle, the golden goose,...

Anais Nin, die Schpferin der weiblichen Sprache der Sexualitt, gab Das Delta der Venus erst kurz vor ihrem Tod frei - 35 Jahre, nachdem sie diese ungemein direkten Schilderungen geschrieben hatte. Die fnfzehn erotischen Episoden stellen in der Tat das meiste in den Schatten, was wir an erotischer Literatur aus der Feder einer Frau kennen.

The Four-Chambered Heart, Anais Nin's 1950 novel, recounts the real-life affair she conducted with cafe guitarist Gonzalo More in 1936. Nin and More rented a house-boat on the Seine, and under the pervading influence of the boat's watchman and More's wife Helba, developed a relationship. More 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....