Books by Anaïs Nin for a New Generation: Recent Publications by Swallow Press
By Nava Atlas | On April 22, 2020 | Updated May 22, 2022 | Comments (0)
Anaïs Nin (1903 – 1977), an iconic literary figure of the 20th century, was best known for her Diary series. A trove of books by Anaïs Nin has recently been reissued in updated editions by Swallow Press, the premier U.S. publisher of her works.
Swallow Press is a division of Ohio University Press, and many of these updated editions have been edited by Paul Herron. As founder and editor of Sky Blue Press, Herron publishes the journal A Café in Space and digital editions of the fiction of Anaïs Nin, as well as a new collection of Nin erotica, Auletris.
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More about Anaïs Nin
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An introduction to Anaïs Nin
Born in France, Nin was by heritage Cuban-American; her full name was Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell.
Best known for her multi-volume series, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, she wrote these journals over the span of more than thirty years (not including her Early Diaries series).
Nin became a feminist icon in the 1970s once a number of volumes of the Diary series were published. They became a touchstone for female readers, and have come to define a large part of Nin’s legacy.
However, her oeuvre went far beyond the diary genre that made her famous. She was also one of the first women writers to create literary female erotica, notably, The Delta of Venus and Little Birds. She was a splendid essayist as well, and was a prolific author of fiction, both short stories and novels.
Following is a selection of new and recent publications by and about Anaïs Nin. And this is just a partial listing — make sure to see the entire list of books by Anaïs Nin at Swallow Press/Ohio University Press.
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Reunited
Reunited: The Correspondence of Anaïs and Joaquín Nin, 1933–1940
By Anaïs Nin and Joaquín Nin
Edited by Paul Herron
Release date: May 2020
In 1913, Joaquín Nin abandoned his family, including his ten-year-old daughter, Anaïs. Twenty years later, Anaïs and Joaquín reunited and began an illicit sexual affair. Long believed to have been destroyed and lost to history, Reunited reveals correspondence between father and daughter, exposing for the first time both sides of their complicated relationship.
Reunited collects the correspondence between Anaïs and Joaquín just before, during, and after the affair, which commenced in 1933, twenty years after he had abandoned his ten-year-old daughter and the rest of his family.
These letters were long believed to have been destroyed and lost to history. In 2006, however, a folder containing Joaquín’s original letters to his daughter was discovered in Anaïs’s Los Angeles home, along with a second folder of her letters to him.
Together, these letters tell the story of an absent father’s attempt to reconnect with his adult daughter and how that rapprochement quickly turned into an illicit sexual relationship.
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Trapeze
Trapeze: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1947–1955
By Anaïs Nin
Edited by Paul Herron
Anaïs Nin made her reputation through publication of her edited diaries and the carefully constructed persona they presented.
It was not until decades later, when the diaries were published in their unexpurgated form, that the world began to learn the full details of Nin’s fascinating life and the emotional and literary high-wire acts she committed both in documenting it and in defying the mores of 1950s America.
Trapeze begins where the previous volume, Mirages, left off: when Nin met Rupert Pole, the young man who became not only her lover but later her husband in a bigamous marriage.
It marks the start of what Nin came to call her “trapeze life,” swinging between her longtime husband, Hugh Guiler, in New York and her lover, Pole, in California, a perilous lifestyle she continued until her death in 1977.
Today what Nin did seems impossible, and what she sought perhaps was impossible: to find harmony and completeness within a split existence. It is a story of daring and genius, love and pain, largely unknown until now.
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Mirages
Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1939–1947
By Anaïs Nin
Edited by Paul Herron
Mirages opens at the dawn of World War II, when Anaïs Nin fled Paris, where she lived for fifteen years with her husband, banker Hugh Guiler, and ends in 1947 when she meets the man who would be “the One,” the lover who would satisfy her insatiable hunger for connection.
Mirages collects, for the first time, the story that was cut from all of Nin’s other published diaries, particularly volumes 3 and 4 of The Diary of Anaïs Nin, which cover the same time period. It is the long-awaited successor to the previous unexpurgated diaries Henry and June, Incest, Fire, and Nearer the Moon.
Mirages answers the questions Nin readers have been asking for decades: What led to the demise of Nin’s love affair with Henry Miller? Just how troubled was her marriage to Hugh Guiler? What is the story behind Nin’s “children,” the effeminate young men she seemed to collect at will?
Mirages is a deeply personal story of heartbreak, despair, desperation, carnage, and deep mourning, but it is also one of courage, persistence, evolution, and redemption that reaches beyond the personal to the universal.
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House of Incest
House of Incest
By Anaïs Nin
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 truth: 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.
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Collages
Collages
By Anaïs Nin
First published in 1964 and reissued in 2019 with a new introduction by Anita Jarczok, Collages showcases Anaïs Nin’s dreamlike and introspective style and psychological acuity.
Seen by some as linked vignettes and by others as a novel, the book is a mood piece that resists categorization. Based on a close friend of Nin’s, Renate is the glue that holds the pieces, by turn fragmentary and full, together.
One character absorbs a lesson from the Koran: “Nothing is ever finished.” With each of Renate’s successive encounters, we take that message to be true.
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Waste of Timelessness
Waste of Timelessness and Other Early Stories
By Anaïs Nin
Written when Anaïs Nin was in her twenties and living in France in the 1920, 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.
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Winter of Artifice: Three Novelettes
Winter of Artifice: Three Novelettes
By Anaïs Nin
Swallow Press first published Winter of Artifice in 1945, following two vastly different versions from other presses. The book opens with a film star, Stella, studying her own, but alien, image on the screen.
It ends in the Manhattan office of a psychoanalyst—the Voice—who, as he counsels patients suffering from the maladies of modern life, reveals himself as equally susceptible to them.
The middle, title story explores one of Nin’s most controversial themes, that of a woman’s sexual relationship with her father. Elliptical, fragmented prose; unconventional structure; surrealistic psychic landscapes—Nin forged these elements into a style that engaged with the artistic concerns of her time but still registers as strikingly contemporary.
This reissue, accompanied by a new introduction by Laura Frost and the original engravings by Nin’s husband Ian Hugo, presents an important opportunity to consider anew the work of an author who laid the groundwork for later writers.
Swallow Press’s Winter of Artifice represents a literary artist coming into her own, with the formal experimentation, thematic daring, and psychological intrigue that became her hallmarks.
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Seduction of the Minotaur
Seduction of the Minotaur
By Anaïs Nin
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.
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Under a Glass Bell
Under a Glass Bell
By Anaïs Nin
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.
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