Product Description
Nacida en Paris de padre espanol, la vida de Anais Nin (1903-1977), a caballo entre Francia y Estados Unidos, da pie a una escritura influida tambien por su vinculacion personal con el psicoanalisis y con el grupo surrealista frances. Cercana a muchos de los intelectuales y artistas del momento, tuvo especial relevancia su relacion con el escritor Henry Miller, gran admirador de su obra, en especial de los Diarios que la autora escribio entre 1920 y 1976. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

pajaritos
muy buen libro aunque de un erotismo triste sin mucho futuro, pero reales que todos nosotros hemos vividoo tenemos. Me gustaría pensar que nuestras vidas son mas felices ahora que tenemos mas libertades y mas opciones.
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Product Description
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 forty years, during which time the Nin catalogue has doubled with the release of the erotica and unexpurgated diaries. This book can be used in two ways: as a source book by which readers can make informed choices when considering newly appearing Nin titles; and as a sort of autobiography in which one witnesses Nin’s growth as a woman and writer. Benjamin Franklin V, a prominent Nin scholar for more than four decades, has made selections from a broad spectrum of her catalogue and has sequenced them chronologically and offers them in their entirety. This allows readers to witness how Nin’s life experiences and relationships affected her fiction, character development, writing philosophy, and how all these factors in turn replenished her lust for life.

The Portable Anaïs Nin includes among its 38 selections complete diary passages about her views on her separated parents, sexual awakenings, incest, abortion, fame, family members, lovers, and facing death; works of fiction including her famous prose poem House of Incest, a selection from Under a Glass Bell, erotica from Delta of Venus, the novellas “This Hunger” and “Stella”; her critical titles Realism and Reality and On Writing; and an interview conducted at the height of her fame.

Whether the reader chooses to read this book selectively or sequentially, The Portable Anaïs Nin provides a rich and rewarding experience.
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Customer Reviews (2)

A. Nin
Bought this book for a friend and never read it.Cannot leave a review.

This Future Was Yesterday

This book, a manifesto of sorts, is probably of most interest for close followers of Nin's work. Written in 1968, the book serves as an exploration and defense of Nin's creative process, and while it was probably fairly engaging at the time, "Of the Future" definitely feels a little dated today. Nin is perhaps best known for her erotic short fiction, and all of her work develops from a commitment to bringing the unconscious substratum of experience into the forefront of the reader's perception, "to proceed from the dream outward" and, fundamentally, to write about what's really going on within the mental and emotional worlds of her characters.

Throughout this book Nin periodically rails against the stuffiness and insincerity of writers and artists preoccupied with conventional realism. Mostly, however, she devotes herself to repeatedly stressing the importance of integrating psychoanalytic and surrealist insights into contemporary art, of exploring and communicating the subjective experience. What she is basically arguing for, though she doesn't seem to realize it, is post-modernism.

This is why the book feels dated: in the past few decades we've already seen, in frequently overblown variations, both the positive and negative ramifications of the kind of art and writing that Nin is arguing so enthusiastically for here. There are definitely some perceptive observations, insights and rewarding anecdotes throughout the book, but the reader will have to work for them, trundling along through what amounts, in part, to an argument for the validity of her own output. I've read one of Nin's novels and was quite impressed, but the lengthy excerpts from a number of her works included in "Of the Future" don't seem to make for very good demonstrations. She talks quite a bit about her own work in this book, and for the devoted reader there appears to be lots of good stuff here. For me, though, it was a little too self-concerned and really rather boring.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect is that much of what Nin calls for is an assertion of independence and individuality in response to the stifling conformity of life in 1950's post-war America. Now, existing as we do in a hyper-individualistic, narcissistic world culture, we may actually begin to imagine the trajectory of the "novels of the future" as a re-envisioning and return to the collective, to a new articulation of community and possible balance between extremes...
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Product Description
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 Anaïs Nin’s personal struggle with sex, love, and emotional fragmentation. Although 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. Written when Nin’s own life was taut with conflicting loyalties, her protagonist Sabina repeatedly asks herself, can one idulge one’s sensual restlessness, the fantasies, the relentless need for adventure without devastating consequences? ... Read more

Customer Reviews (21)

A Review by Dr. Joseph Suglia
A Spy in the House of Love (1959) is the beautifully poetic expression of a desire that is seldom acknowledged. With the greatest clarity, it expresses a woman's desire-or more precisely, a peculiarly feminine desire-to rid herself absolutely of all feminine desire. Her desire desires nothing more than to imitate the vicissitudes of masculine desire.

The main character, Sabrina, is an actress who slips in and out of erotic relations with men-"the house of love" to which the title refers. Like Madame Bovary, she is unfaithful to her husband. Unlike Madam Bovary, however, she is serially unfaithful and seemingly incapable of devoting herself completely to any one man. Garbed in a cape, Sabrina races through the night from one tryst to the next. She is by no means cold. She is sensitive enough to bleed to death from a paper cut; one slight or insult from a passer-by would cause her to vaporize on the street. Indeed, her emotional attachments are impassioned. Although she reads the men with whom she couples as if they were so many books, memorizing every detail of their person, it is clear that each of these men affects her profoundly. It would be incorrect, therefore, to say that she is, for instance, a man imprisoned in the body of a woman. Because she is a woman whose inner world is infinitely rich and who is capable of infinite passion, she longs-fruitlessly, perhaps-to become impassive; it is precisely because she burns with passion that she yearns to rid herself of all passion.

Masculine desire is transient. Once a man has what he desires, he often loses interest and turns his mind to a new object of lust. Sabrina knows this. In the hope of "masculinizing" her own desire, all of Sabrina's inner activity is directed toward the point at which desire is interrupted:

The moment of non-loving, non-desiring. The moment when she took flight, if the man had admired another woman passing by, or talked too long about an old love, the little offences, the small stabs, a mood of indifference, a small unfaithfulness, a small treachery, all of them were warnings of possibly larger ones, to be counteracted by an equal or larger or total unfaithfulness, her own, the most magnificent of counterpoisons, prepared in advance for the ultimate emergencies [59].

Because she knows the limitedness of masculine desire, she is preoccupied with desire's finitude. Her desire envies the evanescence of masculine desire.

How else could she inure herself to the perils of desire except by imitating the desire of men? And how else could she imitate the desire of men except through art? Art always involves fakery and seduction. Sabrina's greatest work of art is her ability to don masks and disguises and become the person she impersonates. As one of her paramours, Donald, writes to her in his "letter to an actress": "I felt... as I watched you act Cinderella, that you were whatever you acted, that you touched that point at which art and life meet and there is only BEING" [121]. In order to cancel within herself all enduring attachments, she chameleonically simulates the "nonchalance" and "full assurance" [34] of men and thereby becomes thoroughly "masculinized": "She knew all of the trickeries in this war of love" [59]. She metamorphoses herself into a woman who is indifferent to the men whom she embraces. Because she is forever a changeling, she is never fully exposed. Her lovers can say nothing that would injure her, for she is not. Even her nudity is a form of concealment: "Before [Mambo, a nightclub musician and one of her many lovers] could speak and harm her with words while she lay naked and exposed, while he prepared a judgment, she was preparing her metamorphosis, so that whatever Sabrina he struck down she could abandon like a disguise, shedding the self he had seized upon and say: `That was not me'" [76]. A simulatrix, she affirms the plasticity of identity. Herself an endless play of masks, she unsettles and destabilizes the self-sameness of the self. She is never one self and therefore is never what anyone-for instance, her husband, Alan-wants her to be ("I want my own Sabrina back" [19], Alan exclaims at one point).

Because she undoes the factitious stability of identity, Sabrina is regarded, like all artists in the novel, as a criminal, a vagabond, a "spy," a "gangster[-] in the world of art" [154]. Her crime is the dispersal of identity. Indeed, she regards herself as a criminal-and this self-recognition, of course, gives way to the most painful experience of guilt. All guilt yearns for confession-"Guilt is the one burden human beings that can never bear alone" [153], she says-and for this reason, she is drawn to her confidant: a lie detector who shadows her and prepares to bring her to justice.

It may be that Sabrina's desire to become-someone-other, like all desire, is incapable of fulfillment. The impossibility of her desire's fulfillment is what gives A Spy in the House of Love its strange beauty. Her desire is for that which she can never own-a trap that is perhaps best expressed in German: Das Mögen mag die Möglichkeit = Desire desires possibility.

Dr. Joseph Suglia

The Multiplicity of Selves
I agree with another reviewer who also wonders why Nin's works are always relegated to Erotica.This is not Erotica.This is a thinking woman's book.

The way Nin writes at times is so beautiful -- she had an immense gift for description, and putting her thoughts in ways that seem lighter than air, but still full of resonance and power and deep as the bottom of the seas.

I have always liked Nin's works, and this was one of her most memorable.This is essential reading.

Nin was haunted by the thought of the "multiplicity of selves" in a similar way to Hermann Hesse, which may be another reason why I liked this story.

The Lioness in Her Amours
Anais Nin is best known for the "official" version of her diaries, which were published to great fanfare--and widely embraced by feminists--during the Sixties and Seventies. But time, scholarship, and greedy publishing practices would eventually reveal that the "official" diaries, which spanned four decades, had been completely rewritten by their author before publication, and many vital, if inconvenient, elements in Nin's life, such as the active presence and financial support of a fairly wealthy husband over the decades, were simply eliminated.

In light of the truth concerning Nin's multiple concerted deceptions, her stated lifelong quest for selfhood as a woman, artistic freedom, and sexual mobility has fallen flat in the eyes of academia and her former readership; later revelations that she willingly participated in a protracted sexual relationship with her own father, seduced powerful men whenever possible to achieve her goals, and ended her life as an active bigamist, removed what little credibility was left of her precarious literary reputation.

Subsequent publication of several volumes of the "unexpurgated" early diaries has only proven that, in her youth, Nin was not by any means the skilled writer she initially appeared to be.

Throughout her life, Nin tried her hand at fiction writing, and, through the wary influence of friends like Gore Vidal, managed to have a series of rambling, listless novels published. A Spy in the House of Love (1954) is certainly the best of the five, which were later collected in a single volume as Cities of the Interior (1975).

Told by friends at the time of its publication that "It is the only new writing" and "It is what writing will be," today the hilariously purple prose of A Spy in the House of Love reads more like the product of a first-year creative writing course.

Obvious, ungrammatical, and illogical, the book teems with obtuse passages like "She walked along the wet sand towards the most brightly lighted wharves where the Dragon offered its neon lighted bodies to the thirsty night explorers" and "Beneath the delicate skin, the tendrils of secret hair, the indentations and valleys of flesh, the volcanic lava flowed, desire incandescent, and where it burned the voices of the blues being sung became a harsh wilderness cry, bird and animal's untamed cry of pleasure and cry of danger and cry of fear and cry of childbirth and cry of wound pain from the same hoarse delta of nature's pits." Even the expression of very simple ideas is often both static and labored: "Her dress was becalmed."

As a result, much of the text reads like an initially promising but badly translated exercise in softcore erotica. Interestingly, it would be as a writer of exactly such erotica that Nin would eventually gain international popular fame, with the publication of Delta of Venus just before her death in 1977.

A Spy in the House of Love has, as Nin intended, little actual plot. Sabina, a reckless, sexually compulsive woman of thirty, carries on a series of affairs about which she anxiously hopes to keep her docile, unquestioning husband, Alan, unaware.

All the while, Sabina is shadowed by the mysterious "lie detector," who represents Sabina's raging super ego in extremis (reviled by her publishers in the Fifties, who wanted the character excised, the surreal lie detector is actually the novel's one accomplished element).The book works best whenever its plot is at its sturdiest, such as those chapters which concern John, a British pilot grounded since the end of the war and haunted by the deaths of his comrades.

Clearly, A Spy in the House of Love was an attempt by its author to come to terms with her sexual impulses and her wayward management of them in her own life: throughout the book, Nin portrays Sabina as a victim of society's hypocritical double standards, and at least momentarily manages to perceive Sabina as a vessel of "love, protection, devotion" where the cuckolded Alan is concerned.

The overall impression the book makes is that Sabina, a woman "at war with herself," is a narcissistic sociopath or a sufferer of Borderline Personality Disorder who is unable to distinguish genuine, mature, and adult love from adulterous passions made all the more attractive by the fact of infidelity (and clearly, guilt arising from infidelity is not a quality unique to women, as Nin would have readers to believe). Ultimately accepting of no rules or boundaries, the willful Sabina, who is incapable of a genuinely intimate, honest relationship of any kind, on any level, creates her own very private hell. If Nin had understood this, and made Sabina responsible for both her actions and their repercussions, then A Spy in the House of Love would have been a different book entirely, and one worthy of continued publication and a wide readership.

As written, A Spy in the House of Love is a badly edited, poorly advised, and weakly composed meditation on sexuality which inadvertently exposes something very different from that which its author intends. In later life, Nin became an extremely competent, if completely unreliable, writer, as the rewritten "official" diaries prove. But here, sentences like "...but only one ritual, a joyous, joyous, joyous impaling of woman on men's sensual mast," naming the only black character--a Caribbean drummer--"Mambo," and portraying a male homosexual as grossly effeminate reduce the novel to the level of caricature and unintentional parody.

Every spy's life ended in ignominious death
Ana?s Nin's "A Spy in the House of Love" is a short novel that seems to be more a dream rather than a narrative. The writer is not concerned with exploiting situations or characters -- rather she prefers to deal with the inner forces that move her main character here, Sabina. She is a married woman who in the 50's New York spends her time enjoying her freedom, meeting men and feeling guilty for betraying her husband.

Sabina's conflict is what moves the narrative -- but no only it. Nin produces a character with a very believable life and thoughts. It is not a surprise that she is the only one which is fully developed throughout the book -- but, actually, it is not a problem that the other characters sound more like walking stereotypes.

Less sensual than her masterpiece, "Delta of Venus", Nin's prose is dreamy, sometimes surreal, without logic. This characteristic is what makes the book beautiful. Just like Sabina, the readers feel like spying on something, something they are now allowed to know. As the narrator says at some point, a spy hasn't much chance, his/her life ends in ignominious death, but until then we can enjoy the pleasure of peeping on somebody's life.

Who is Sabina?
I often find parallels between what I'm reading and what I'm watching and with A Spy in the House of Love I find an affinity between the book and a film, Dark City if that film were told from the point of view of John's "wife" and I also see an affinity with the anime series, Serial Experiements Lain. In all three cases they are stories of women struggling to find themselves among the artifice in which they live, whether it is self created or created by others. To put in terms the book uses, Sabina is like Duchamp's painting of Nude Descending a Staircase; she is a series of frames, a moment of action captured on canvas, but not a single destilled representation of that woman. No one will know what that woman looked like but they will know how she walked down the steps.

Sabina has memories of past loves, past adventures, past meetings but so current feeling of who she is. She is a name. She has a husband who loves her dearly but she is constantly running from him looking for love among her artist friends. There is also clearly a strong note of autobiography in the last third of the book where Sabina meets up with the artist's enclave in New York and that gives this otherwise sensuous tale a note of sadness. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Memory and desire
A wonderfully written, highly poetic book. It leaves the reader wanting more. Each story is a perfect little world full of beguiling characters. Anais Nin travels the world of Eros and leaves no territory uncharted. You'll love it, trust me! ... Read more

Product Description
In 'The Instruments of Passion' a young man decides to join a very much monastery with only seven members that practiced some, what would appear to be strange, rituals of bondage and the whipping of a very young girl, also a resident, named Daisy. The young writer is astonished by her beauty and her willingness to submit to the torture and pain of the monks daily ritual. Everything seems so normal, so traditional and so important in their search for inner peace that our innocent observer very quickly accepts all .... That is until a certain day when there is a 'graduation' of sorts and our young innocent's world and his unrequited love for Daisy comes to a crashing end ....

In 'The Misfortunes of Mary' we find another very much Victorian novel where a mature Colonel Barrington agrees to a secretarial contract with a very and beautifull young girl, Mary. Although all appears normal, our young secretary, now contractually bound, finds that she is in an impossible postion and the jaded colonel immediately starts to play mind games demanding her total submission to those yummie yummie whims.

In 'White Stains', the third novel by Naais Nin we are treated to four very short mini stories that are the hallmark of a very eclectic author whose works many people have grown to love.

Finally, in 'Innocence' by Harrier Daimler a young and very sickly Adrian is confined to bed on the very edge of death when finally his mother and father decide to hire a nurse to care for their son in his last days. Again, in this contemporary erotica, all is not what it seems. While the world around him sees Adrian as a poor sickly boy, the reader is treated to the real secret life of Adrian where he is able to use his weakness and intelligence to get 'everthing' he wants from the nursemaid, Rose, while pretty well controlling everyone else around him.

Rudolf Spoerer
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Product Description

From her famous diaries, that she began in 1914 at the age of eleven, Anais Nin reads passages which reflect the recurring themes of her work. In a slow, clear, heavily accented, hypnotic voice, Nin draws the listener into her spell–binding stories of a highly personal world as she paints a vivid picture of a woman as artist and self. This is an extraordinary, historic, archival, and memorable recording which speaks in a fresh voice to new generations.

Product Description
Drawn from journals, this book is an account of a woman's sexual awakening, covering a single momentous year - 1931-32, in Paris, when June fell in love with Henry Miller, undermining her own idealized marriage. The question of the outcome of June Miller's return to Paris dominates her thoughts. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

not what it appears
I received this book as a gift two years ago and my first thought was "lectures and essays... how boring", but I ended up being swept off me feet by this book.It's beautifully written and contains suchinsight into the human,and female condition that I have bought copies of itfor all of the people who are dearest to me.It's a book to refer back tothroughout your life, and reread when you lose your way. ... Read more

Product Description
Lillian has made her escape to the silver lagoons and lush tropical greenery of a beach resort in Mexico. Playing jazz piano at the Black Pearl by night, by day she plays the fugitive, from a silent New York marriage and children and from old Parisian friends and lovers. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

GOLCONDA, HERE I COME!
Anais has done it again.A book which captures the reader's need for sensual, lyrical description as well as having the ability to allow common emotional themes to transcend the two covers, Nin paints for us the city ofGolconda, Mexico, with its poor but happy natives and sweltering tropicalescapism.The main character, Lillian, is a jazz musician who travels toGolconda for a 3 month stint and along the way rediscovers the beauty ofMexico she knew as a child, of the wise and natural existence known tothose she meets, and the demons she must exercise from her own past.Abeautiful exploration into human existence.If you liked Anais' diaries,try this story...you will see links into her own past.And perhaps, evenyours. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

. . . welcome and much-needed volume . . .
Excerpt From the review appearing in the 1997 issue of Anais: An International Journal:

By Marion Fay

The title of this welcome and much-needed volume, Anais Nin: A Book of Mirrors, is both appropriate andprovocative. The mirror concept works because this hefty book of some 420pages does indeed reflect multiple aspects of Anais Nin as seen by itssixty-five contributors. Moreover, it not only reveals how many readershave seen themselves reflected in her work and in her person, but also theways in which many of us have been refracted--literally opened-up--and, touse one of her favorite terms, "transmuted" by theexperience.

The mirror concept, of course, also carries with it thenotion of partial vision, indeed distortion, implications that underlieattacks on Anais Nin by those who despair at her omissions of facts, whofocus exclusively on externally manifest behavior.

The seventy-fiveentries brought together by Paul Herron include essays, scholarly comment,excerpts from literary works and interviews, poems, and personaltestimonials, along with photos and illustrations. Most of thecontributions reflect favorably upon Anais Nin, but some raise seriousquestions about her love affairs, duplicities, and the professed incestwith her father. Wendy DuBow, for one, who in 1994 edited a volume ofinterviews with her, points to weaknesses in Nin's thinking and writing,and she makes clear that her interest in Nin is scholarly and sociological,and not governed by any emotional attachment.

The list of those whoresponded included well-known Nin scholars, such as Sharon Spencer andSuzanne Nalbantian, contributors to this journal, psychologists,non-traditional healers, personal friends, and literary figures like EricaJong and Allen Ginsberg.

Several early selections speak of visits toLouveciennes, the village that for many readers situates Nin in place andtime because of its prominence in the first volume of The Diary of AnaisNin. Jacques G. Lay, the village's honorary deputy mayor, laments thatAnais Nin has been "forgotten at home," but celebrates the factthat thousands of visitors from around the world come to Louveciennes"to imbibe the air Anais breathed, the atmosphere sheloved."

Several selections in A Book of Mirrors trace the steps ofresearchers who examined some of the one hundred and fifty bound originaldiary manuscripts in the Special Collection of the Library at theUniversity of California in Los Angeles. Elyse Lamm Pineau, a professor atSouthern Illinois University, unexpectedly came across a cache of audiotapes recording Nin in action, and Elizabeth Podnieks interspersescarefully chosen passages from her own diary with excerpts from Nin's aspart of an inquiry into what makes a diary "genuine."

DianeRichard-Allerdyce reveals the evolution of her attitude toward Anais Nin:from glowing adulation--combined with an unwillingness to criticize her--toa reasoned appreciation of Nin's life and work. Discoursing on the writingof her play, "A Literary Soulmate," an excerpt of which appearsin the book, Richard-Allerdyce examines Nin's influence on contemporarywomen who take up writing. The play itself deconstructs the severalversions of Nin's "Birth" story and, in doing so, comments onsuch topics as the conflict between pregnancy and career, which tortures somany women, and on the nature of truth.

Truth-telling, andtruth-avoidance in the case of Anais Nin also occupy some othercontributors, offering accusations and justifications. In a short essay,Nuria Ribera i Gorriz pushes us to think about the distinction between theintent to deceive (a form of lying) and the intent to protect the selfand/or others (a form of half-truth).

The last section of A Book ofMirrors deals with Nin's final days, a sad story, unknown to many of herreaders--Barbara Kraft reports on the many hours she spent with Nin as shelingered on the borderline of death. In an excerpt from her manuscript, AnEdited Life, Kraft presents Nin in the guise of a character, Maite Lerin,who is experiencing but also reporting on her own dying.

In a briefreview one can only suggest the wide range of views, and the variety ofmodes and styles of expression gathered in this so aptly titled Book ofMirrors. It is not a book to be devoured whole. Rather, it is one to browseand ponder over time. Laden with rewarding insights and warm feelings, italso occasionally asks the reader to enter supernatural zones, wheredreams, spirits, and zany coincidences predominate. More than anything,perhaps, A Book of Mirrors once again provides evidence of Anais Nin'sextraordinary, and seemingly perpetual, influence on vast numbers ofpeople, no matter what her harshest critics may have to say.

A magnificent celebration of life
Book Review by Maryanne Raphael, Writers World ANAIS NIN, A BOOK OF MIRRORSdoes what no biography, no single study can do.It gives us a glimpse of the thousand faces of Anais Nin.It is an exciting anthology ofpersonal memoirs, interviews, tributes in prose and poetry, fantasies andessays. Anyone opening this book should be warned he or she may berisking their lives as they now know it. More than 60 authors share howAnais changed their lives and gave it meaning.Nin's passionate loveaffair with life is contagious. In his foreword, Gunther Stuhlmanncalled Anais, "an exemplary sensitive and complex modern woman whosought her salvation in her art." Anais used her life to create, torelate and to fascinate. Her writings help us to return to our mostprecious dreams. Anais has us re-evaluate everything, dig deeper intoourselves.She becomes a mirror for each of us, an opportunity for us toexamine our souls and for the first time recognize who we really are. MIRRORS is a magnificent celebration of Life. I would recommend it toanyone wanting to know more about Anais or about themselves. The end ... Read more

Product Description
For readers unfamiliar with her subject, Maryanne Raphael's biography, Anais Nin, The Voyage Within, is a sensitive, uncomplicated introduction to the life and work of one of the 20th century's most quintessentially feminine artists. For Nin devotees, the biography is a refresher course taking us back through the vast material of the Diaries and novels that enchanted and inspired our love.Raphael accepts Nin entirely on her own terms. Thanks to a warm, personal relationship with Rupert Pole, Nin's surviving husband and executor of her estate, Raphael opens up some of the mystery that has hitherto surrounded Nin's relationship with her husbands-an aspect of Nin's life that was never explicitly described in the original Diaries. The result is a multi-dimensional portrait in which Nin's two selves, artist and woman are fully integrated. Nin the woman consciously chooses to realize female desire, give form to female imagination, always loving as she remains completely focused on birthing a new unabashedly feminine literature. Thank you, Maryanne! -Dolores Brandon, Author of IN THE SHADOW OF MADNESS, A Memoir ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Anaïs Nin is like the Cuban political soul both fractured and brilliant.
The Cuban political soul is both fractured and brilliant, but above all sensual. Looking at present day the militant anti-communism of the Cuban exile community, it is hard to imagine but it is true that this comes, in part, from the illuminating experience of a failed romance with the far left.

Anaïs Nin (Angela Anais Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell 1903-1977) whose father and mother both had Cuban rootscan be taken to represent an important vein of the political-sexual tension of the Island.One aspect of Spanish rule was Catholicism, and the cruelties of that metropolis in the Cuban wars of independence led many away from religion to explore the far left.Of course for the young the attraction of left was sexual freedom.This took too many innocents to flirt with the far left and receive deception, disillusionment and disaster.

My Catholic roots were in Ireland through my father and thus I had no problem with the Catholic Church; and found the communists distasteful; and was at peace with the idea that Spain was the eternal enemy of my family. Believing strongly then that the wages of sin were eternal damnation I stayed away what ever the temptation.

Thus I listened in silence when my step-father Enrique Sanz mentioned a trip he had made in his youth to visit Leon Trotsky in Mexico. When I arrived in the U.S. in 1962, he asked me to defend his friend the non-communist Marxist Luis Simón to the FBI I did as he asked, but the reluctance in my tone must have tipped the investigators off.

Strangely there is no hate like that of a lover spurned and these leftwing militants often became the most aggressive enemies of Castro and the communists and the feeling was mutual.Both Sandalio Junco and Eusebio Mujal former Trotskyites became strong anti-communists. Junco was murdered in 1942 when Batista was an elected president, apparently as "part of a deliberate campaign to of the Communists to liquidate Auténtico labor leaders."Spaniard Andrés Nin, also a Troskyite, the mentor of Junco,was "disappeared"by the communists in Civil War Spain.

The violent splintering of the extreme left was a matter of faith and heresy generating great hate among the various factions.For instance, Anaïs wrote: " At a cocktail party at the home of Dr. Hass of UCLA, I again ran into an editor of Partisan Review.The magazine became hostile to me years ago when I answered truthfully that I was not a relative ofAndrés Nin the anarchist and their hero.There are many Nins in Barcelona. They thought I repudiated him because he was a Trotsky man. Ridiculous, I was against Franco. Andres Nin was a hero. ... "

Ever amorous, ever emotional Anaïs Nin also wrote: "...Taxicabs pass by, full of people singing, with red flags.What tightness and anger I feel, blindly against them. Blind, unreasoning. The instinct has made a choice.I hate the workman.I hate the collectivity. I hate the masses and I hate revolutions.Love of beauty has carried me here ... But my whole being is set against it all ... "


Thus, Cuba --like Anaïs Nin--did not love communism.Castro could never have reached power if he had admitted before hand that he was a communist.

(a fragment from a manuscript draft "Love and War in Cuba" ... Read more

Product Description
Children of the Albatross is considered by many to be one of Anaïs Nin’s most beautiful books; it is also a groundbreaker in that it eloquently addresses androgyny and homosexuality, which few literary works dared to do in 1940s America. We are introduced to three of Nin’s most significant characters: Djuna, Lillian, and Sabina, all of whom represent different aspects of Nin’s character—serenity, earthiness, and the femme fatale, respectively.

In the first part of the novel, “The Sealed Room,” we witness Djuna’s developing perception of sexuality as we follow her from when, as an adolescent, she has learned to fear powerful, masculine, potent men, to her search for love in young, sexually ambivalent men—the “transparent children”—finally fusing with an airy teenage boy to whom she introduces the world of love and sex.

In the second part, “The Café,” Nin reveals the psychological truth of her relationship with her lover and mentor, Henry Miller, via her main characters’ interactions with the powerful, omnipotent Jay, whom Nin fashioned after Miller.

Children of the Albatross offers the reader Anaïs Nin’s sense of “inner reality” perhaps more beautifully and effectively than in any other work.
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Customer Reviews (1)

A tribute to Nin by one of her "Ninnies"
During the late 1960s to early 1970s, Anais Nin, most famous for her multi-leveled diary and for her erotica, became something of a cult figure for young women. These young women affectionately referred to themselves as the "Ninnies." They bought her books, attended her lectures, carried on long-term correspondence with her (Anais vowed she would never let a fan letter go unanswered), and even attended informal workshops at her home. After reading COLLAGE OF DREAMS I am pretty certain that Spencer was a Ninnie herself.

COLLAGE OF DREAMS, like Bettina Knapp's ANAIS NIN, is inevitably a bit on the worshipful side. Rather than being a critical evaluation of Nin's work, it seems to be an advocate of her work, emphasizing all its wonderful aspects and never really touching upon its weaknesses. This is a wonderful breath of fresh air when contrasted with Deirdre Bair's verging-on-hostile ANAIS NIN: A BIOGRAPHY, but it doesn't do much in the way of helping the reader relate to Nin's oeuvre. In fact, Sharon Spencer writes a lot like Anais Nin herself, utilizing two hallmarks of Nin's style: a cascade of beautiful and luxurious words; bad organization of ideas. Each paragraph seems to contain at least four sentences that should've served as topic sentences for their own paragraphs. One gets the impression that Sharon Spencer would've liked to have been Anais Nin.

As a footnote to the benign personality cult that formed around Anais Nin in the late 60s and early 70s, COLLAGE OF DREAMS is indispensable. Spencer's love of Anais Nin and Nin's work really comes through, and it is quite heartwarming. But for critical evaluation, and for a more balanced assessment of Anais Nin's successes and failures as a writer, I recommend ANAIS NIN: AN INTRODUCTION as well as THE CRITICAL RESPONSE TO ANAIS NIN. ... Read more