Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics, they take us from snowy Japan to springtime Vienna, from haunted New England to a sun-drenched Mediterranean island, and from a game of chess on the ocean to a love story on the moon. Beautifully designed and printed, these collectible editions are bound in colourful, tactile cloth and stamped with foil. Beautiful, bored and bourgeoise, Sabina leads a double life inspired by her relentless desire for fleeting romance. But when the secrecy of her affairs becomes too much to bear, Sabina makes a late night phone-call to a stranger from a bar, and begins a confession that captivates the unknown man and soon inspires him to seek her out...

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.

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 loyalties, her protagonist Sabina repeatedly asks herself, can one idulge one's sensual restlessness, the fantasies, the relentless need for adventure without devastating consequences?

The inspiration for the six-part series "Little Birds" from Sophia Al-Maria. These thirteen erotic short stories by the acclaimed author of Henry and June explore the nature of desire, taboo, and female 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. "[It is] so distinct an advance in the depiction of female sensuality that I felt, on reading it, enormous gratitude."--Alice Walker "One of contemporary literature's most important writers.--Newsweek

'What did she expect of him? What was her quest? Did she have an unfulfilled desire?' Transgressive desires and sexual encounters are recounted in these four pieces from one of the greatest writers of erotic fiction. Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

"Inventive, sophisticated . . . highly elegant naughtiness."-Cosmopolitan
In Delta of Venus Anais Nin penned 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. This is an extraordinarily rich and exotic collection from the master of erotic writing.
Anais Nin (1903-1977) was born in Paris and aspired at an early age to be a writer. An influential artist and thinker, she was the author of several novels, short stories, critical studies, a collection of essays, two volumes of erotica, and nine published volumes of her Diary.

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.

'My real writing was put aside when I set out in search of the erotic. These are my adventures in that world of prostitution' In her first volume of erotic writings, Delta of Venus, Anaïs Nin explored the nature of female sexuality. Little Birds is broader in its scope, glimpsing in dream-like fashion the subtle or explicit means by which men and women are aroused. Each of the thirteen vignettes captures a moment of sexual awakening, recognition or fulfilment. Lust, obsession, fantasy and desire emerge as part of the human condition, as pure or as complex as any other of its aspects. Little Birds may be seen as an attempt to create the ultimate sexual encounter or as a depiction of the diversity of sexual needs; as the author herself says, 'The sexual life is usually enveloped in many layers, for all of us . . . It is a veiled woman, half-dreamed'. The first volume of her erotic writings, Delta of Venus, is also published by Penguin.

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.

In Delta of Venus Anaïs Nin conjures up a glittering cascade of sexual encounters. Creating her own 'language of the senses', she explores an area that was previously the domain of male writers and brings to it her own unique perceptions. Her vibrant and impassioned prose evokes the essence of female sexuality in a world where only love has meaning.

Her second volume of erotic writings, Little Birds, is also published by Penguin.

Sabrina is a firebird blazing through 1950s New York: she is a woman daring to enjoy the sexual licence that men have always known. Wearing extravagant outfits and playing dangerous games of desire, she deliberately avoids committment, gripped by the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake.

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.

In The Novel of the Future, Anais Nin explores the act of creation-in film, art, and dance as well as literature-to chart a new direction for the young artist struggling against what she perceived as the sterility, formlessness, and spiritual bankruptcy afflicting much of mid-twentieth-century fiction. Nin offers, instead, an argument for and synthesis of the poetic novel and discusses her own efforts in this genre as well as its influence on the development of such writers as D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, Marguerite Young, and Djuna Barnes. In chapters devoted to the pursuit of the hidden self, the genesis of fiction, and the relationship between the diary and fiction, she addresses the materials, techniques, and nourishment of the arts, and the functions of art itself. Originally published in 1968, The Novel of the Future remains a classic among both creative writers and literary scholars. This new Swallow Press edition includes an introduction by Nin biographer Deirdre Bair.

The author's experiences in Mexico, California, New York, and Paris, her psychoanalysis, and her experiment with LSD. "Through her own struggling and dazzling courage [Nin has] shown women groping with and growing with the world" (Minneapolis Tribune). Edited and with a Preface by Gunther Stuhlmann; Index.

Nin's years of struggle and final triumph as an author in America. "Transcending mere self-revelation... the diary examines human personality with a depth and understanding seldom surpassed since Proust...dream and fact are balanced and...in their joining lie the elements of masterpiece" (Washington Post). Edited and with a Preface by Gunther Stuhlmann; Index.

Here, in more than twenty essays, Nin shares her unique perceptions of people, places, and the arts. Includes several lectures and two interviews.

Mirages opens at the dawn of World War II, when Anais 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. In the middle looms a period Nin describes as "hell," during which she experiences a kind of erotic madness, a delirium that fuels her search for love. As a child suffering abandonment by her father, Anais wrote, "Close your eyes to the ugly things," and, against a horrifying backdrop of war and death, Nin combats the world's darkness with her own search for light. 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 Anais 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.

Anais Nin's "Ladders to Fire" interweaves the stories of several women, each emotionally inhibited in her own way: through self-doubt, fear, guilt, moral drift, and distrust. The novel follows their inner struggles to overcome these barriers to happiness and wholeness. The author's own experiences, as recorded in her famous diaries, supplied the raw material for her fiction. It was her intuitive, experimental, and always original style that transformed one into the other. Nin herself memorably claimed that "it was the fiction writer who edited the diary."
"Ladders to Fire" is the first book of Nin's continuous novel, "Cities of the Interior, " which also includes "Children of the Albatross, ""The Four-Chambered Heart, ""A Spy in the House of Love, " and "Seduction of the Minotaur." These loosely interlinked stories develop the characters and themes established in the first volume, leading slowly toward a resolution of inner turmoil and conflict.
This Swallow Press reissue of "Ladders to Fire" includes a new introduction by Nin scholar Benjamin Franklin V, as well as Gunther Stuhlmann's classic foreword to the 1995 edition.

"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.... With her first swallow of air she inhaled a drug of forgetfulness well known to adventurers." Seduction of the Minotaur is the fifth and final volume of Anais 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 Anais 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.