A French-born novelist, passionate eroticist, and short story writer, who gained international fame with her journals. Spanning the years from 1931 to 1974, they chronicle one woman's profound voyage of self-discovery and assertion of individuality. Initially overlooked, she rose to prominence in the 1960s and is now regarded as a leading female writer of the 20th century. Her work serves as an inspiration for women challenging conventionally defined gender roles, championing the idea that a woman's primary identity is to be human.
Exploring themes of eroticism, homosexuality, and androgyny, this novel delves into the psychological complexities of its characters, many of whom reflect aspects of the author herself. Divided into two parts, "The Sealed Room" and "The Café," it showcases Nin's distinctive diaristic style and employs layered metaphors to vividly convey the intricacies of human relationships and desires.
Volume 2 of The Quotable Anais Nin contains 365 quotations (one for each day of the year) with confirmed citations. The contents are divided into categories of Lust for Life; Love and Sensuality; Consciousness; Women and Men; and Writing and Art. The quotations come from a wide spectrum of Anais Nin's work, some of it as yet unpublished, including her famous diaries, fiction, erotica, critical work, lectures, and interviews. Collected, edited and introduced by Paul Herron.
"Anaïs Nin, in 1955, was for all practical purposes a failed writer. She could interest no publisher in her introspective and feminine fiction, nor could she keep her past titles in print. But at the same time, she was keeping a diary begun when she was eleven years old. In The Diary of Others, Nin begins to realize that the diary itself was her most valuable writing, but she wonders how she could ever publish such a document, filled with love affairs and deceptions as well as incest and bigamy, without harming those she held most dear-her brother, her lover, and especially her husband of more than thirty years. When The Diary of Others opens, Nin has recently (and bigamously) married Rupert Pole, her young lover in California; she then struggles to keep a bicoastal double marriage alive, and she vainly seeks a publisher for her novels. She later begins a collaboration with two men who would change her fortunes-literary agent Gunther Stuhlmann and publisher Alan Swallow. And she is aided both financially and commercially by her long-estranged lover and colleague Henry Miller, whose rise to fame after the famous obscenity trials has given him the financial freedom to offer Nin the proceeds from the publication of his letters to her during the 1930s and '40s. After much deliberation, Nin comes up with a formula that allows her to publish her long-anticipated Paris diaries in such a way that she can describe her personal growth and relationships with fascinating characters such as Miller, Otto Rank and Antonin Artaud without disclosing the intimate details of her life. The Diary of Others documents Anaïs Nin's ascension from obscurity and commercial failure to sudden vindication, validation and fame"-- Provided by publisher
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.
Noveller. Transgressive desires and sexual encounters are recounted in these four pieces
Written when Ana s Nin was in her twenties and living in France, the stories collected in Waste of Timelessness contain many elements familiar to those who know her later work as well as revelatory, early clues to themes developed in those more mature stories and novels. Seeded with details remembered from childhood and from life in Paris, the wistful tales portray artists, writers, strangers who meet in the night, and above all, women and their desires. These experimental and deeply introspective missives lay out a central theme of Nin's writing: the contrast between the public and private self. The stories are taut with unrealized sexual tension and articulate the ways that language and art can shape reality. Nin's deft humor, ironic wit, and ecstatic prose display not only superb craftsmanship but also the author's own constant balancing act between feeling and rationality, vulnerability and strength. Perhaps more than any other writer of the twentieth century, she mastered that act and wrote about it on her own terms, defying the literary and social norms of the time.
Anais Nin made her reputation through publication of her edited diaries and the carefully constructed persona they presented.
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.
Focusing on the creative process across various art forms, Anaïs Nin advocates for a poetic approach to novel writing as a response to the perceived sterility of mid-twentieth-century fiction. She synthesizes her insights with discussions on the hidden self, the genesis of fiction, and the interplay between diary writing and storytelling. Nin also reflects on her influences and the impact of her work on notable writers like D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller, emphasizing the vital role of art in personal and artistic development.