Anaïs Nin - Recent Titles from Ohio University Press

Waste of Timelessness and Other Early Stories

Wed, 01 Dec 1993

Waste of Timelessness and Other Early Stories (1993)

By Anaïs Nin

These stories precede all of Nin's published work to date. In them are many sources of the more mature work that collectors and growing writers can appreciate.

Written when Anaïs Nin was in her twenties and living in Louveciennes, France, these stories contain many elements that will delight her readers: details remembered from childhood, of life in Paris, the cafés, theatres; characters including dancers, artists, writers, women who devote themselves to their work and visions as well as romance, strangers met in the night; themes such as the scruples of lovers, the search for brilliant, imaginative living; the writer's experimentation with exotic words like “sybaritic” and “violaceous”. In the craft of these stories readers are treated to a deft sense of humor, ironic wit, much conversation as well as ecstatic prose, and surprise endings. Throughout all, the Nin personality shines, a wonderful mixture of feeling and rationality, of vulnerability and strength.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Waste+of+Timelessness+and+Other+Early+Stories.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

The Novel of the Future

Mon, 30 Jun 1986

The Novel of the Future (1986)

By Anaïs Nin

In The Novel of the Future, Anaïs Nin explores the act of creation—in literature, film, art, and dance—to arrive at a new synthesis for the young artist struggling against the sterility, formlessness, and spiritual bankruptcy afflicting much of modern fiction. Identifying those trends which she finds most destructive in modern fiction (reportage, the substitution of violence for emotion, and the growing cults of ugliness, toughness, and caricature), Nin offers, instead, an argument for and synthesis of the poetic novel.

Drawing upon such related arts as filmmaking, painting, and dance, Nin discusses her own efforts in this genre as well as 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.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/The+Novel+of+the+Future.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Under a Glass Bell

Fri, 01 May 1970

Under a Glass Bell (1970)

By Anaïs Nin

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.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Under+a+Glass+Bell.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

A Spy in the House of Love

Thu, 01 Jan 1970

A Spy in the House of Love (1970)

By Anaïs Nin

Although Anaïs 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?

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/A+Spy+in+the+House+of+Love.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Collages

Wed, 01 Jan 1964

Collages (1964)

By Anaïs Nin

”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 of old ships. They stood in the heart of fountains glistening with water as if they had just been born. They sat under the trees in the parks summer and winter. Some wore costumes of other periods, and some no clothes at all. Men, women, children, kings, dwarfs, gargoyles, unicorns, lions, clowns, heroes, wise men, prophets, angels, saints, and soldiers preserved for Vienna a vision of eternity.

As a child Renate could see them from her bedroom window. At night, when the white muslin curtains fluttered out like ballooning wedding dresses, she heard them whispering like figures which had been petrified by a spell during the day and came alive only at night. Their silence by day taught her to read their frozen lips as one reads the messages of deaf mutes. On rainy days their granite eye sockets shed tears mixed with soot.

Renate would never allow anyone to tell her the history of the statues, or to identify them. This would have situated them in the past. She was convinced that people did not die, they became statues. They were people under a spell and if she were watchful enough they would tell her who they were and how they lived now.

If I had been asked then what was going to follow the description of the statues, I could not have answered. I was fascinated by the image of these many statues and of the child Renate inventing stories about them and dialoguing with them. It may have been that this image expressed the feeling I often had that people appear to us as a one-dimensional statue until we go deeper into their life story. People are like mute statues under a spell of appearance, and static, until we let them whisper their secrets. And this only happens at night. That is, when we are able to dream, imagine, and explore the unconscious. We see the external self. Because Collages took its images from painting and sculpture, I liked the idea that sculpture and painting could become animated, speaking, confessing, and then in daylight returning to their previous forms as statues or paintings. They spoke only to the artist. To me it meant dramatizing our relation to art, one feeding the other, the interrelation between human beings and the artist’s conception of them. In daylight (consciousness) we catch them all only in one attitude, one form. At night, we discover their lives.”

—Anaïs Nin, “The Novel of the Future,” (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986), 128

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Collages.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

D. H. Lawrence

Wed, 01 Jan 1964

D. H. Lawrence (1964)
An Unprofessional Study

By Anaïs Nin

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 Anaïs 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, as well as his attention to primitivism and to women. But what Anaïs Nin brought to the explication of Lawrence's writing was an understanding of the fusion of imaginative, intuitive, and intellectual elements from which he drew his characters, themes, imagery and symbolism.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/D.+H.+Lawrence.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Seduction of the Minotaur

Sun, 01 Jan 1961

Seduction of the Minotaur (1961)

By Anaïs Nin

An excerpt from Seduction of the Minotaur:

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, the golden fleece, the golden robin, the goldenrod, the goldenseal, the golden warbler, the golden wattles, the golden wedding, and the gold fish, and the gold of pleasure, the goldstone, the gold thread, the fool's gold.

With her first swallow of air she inhaled a drug of forgetfulness well known to adventurers.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Seduction+of+the+Minotaur.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Winter of Artifice

Sun, 01 Jan 1961

Winter of Artifice (1961)
Three Novelettes

By Anaïs Nin

Winter of Artifice is a collection of novelettes: ‘Stella,’ ‘Winter of Artifice,’ and ‘The Voice.’

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Winter+of+Artifice.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

The Four-Chambered Heart

Thu, 01 Jan 1959

The Four-Chambered Heart (1959)

By Anaïs Nin

The Four-Chambered Heart, Anaïs Nin's 1950 novel, recounts the real-life affair she conducted with café guitarist Gonzalo Moré in 1936. Nin and Moré rented a house-boat on the Seine, and under the pervading influence of the boat's watchman and Moré's wife Helba, developed a relationship. Moré 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. The character of Djuna features in other novels, perhaps weaving a directly autobiographical thread into Nin's fiction. The gypsy musician, Rango, is therefore Moré, and his invalid wife is Zora. The old watchman is present as a force which, along with Zora, works against the lovers in their quest for happiness.

Nin's main concern is the 'outside,' and how it affects the 'interior.' Water is a cleverly used theme. “I have no great fear of depths,” says Djuna, “and a great fear of shallow living.” Rango and Djuna's relationship is, in effect, their effort to remain afloat. Often, Nin employs a stream of consciousness, especially in her flowing analyses of love, life and music, which continues the water image.

Anaïs Nin's writing is typically exquisite in its detail and texture. She describes Paris: its 'black lacquered cobblestones' and 'silver filigree trees.' The 'humid scarfs of fog' on the river, and 'the sharp incense of roasted chestnuts' reveal their source through their reality: Nin's personal experience.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/The+Four-Chambered+Heart.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Ladders to Fire

Thu, 01 Jan 1959

Ladders to Fire (1959)

By Anaïs Nin

After struggling with her own press and printing her own works, Anaïs Nin succeeded in getting Ladders to Fire accepted and published in 1946. This recognition marked a milestone in her life and career. Admitted into the fellowship of American novelists, she maintained the individuality of her literary style. She resisted realistic writing and drew on the experience and intuitions of her diary to forge a novelistic style emphasizing free association, the language of emotion, spontaneity, and improvisation.

Ladders to Fire is the first volume of Nin's celebrated series of novels called Cities of the Interior

For Anaïs Nin, her writing and her life were not separable, they were both part of the same experience. She claimed that “is it the fiction writer who edited the diary.”

Anaïs Nin continues to find an audience, whether for her fiction, her diaries, or her own life story, which has enjoyed the attention of biographers and filmmakers. This 1995 reissue of Ladders to Fire has a new cover and foreword.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Ladders+to+Fire.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.