Anaïs Nin

The Four-Chambered Heart
By Anaïs Nin
· Introduction by Anita Jarczok

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.

Children of the Albatross
By Anaïs Nin
· Introduction by Anita Jarczok

This novel, from Anaïs Nin’s Cities of the Interior series, plays out in two parts: “The Sealed Room” and “The Café.” Nin portrays her characters—many of whom represent Nin herself—with intense psychological depth as she boldly depicts eroticism, homosexuality, and androgyny using richly layered metaphors and her signature diaristic style.

Reunited
The Correspondence of Anaïs and Joaquín Nin, 1933–1940
By Anaïs Nin and Joaquín Nin
· Edited by Paul Herron
· Introduction by Paul Herron
· Preface by Paul Herron

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.

Collages
By Anaïs Nin
· Introduction by Anita Jarczok

First published in 1964 and now reissued with a new introduction by Anita Jarczok, Collages showcases Nin’s dreamlike and introspective style and psychological acuity. Seen by some as linked vignettes and some as a novel, the book is a mood piece that resists categorization.

Trapeze
The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1947–1955
By Anaïs Nin
· Edited by Paul Herron
· Introduction by Benjamin Franklin V
· Preface 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.

Waste of Timelessness and Other Early Stories
By Anaïs Nin
· Introduction by Allison Pease
· Foreword by Gunther Stuhlmann

Written when Anaïs 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

Winter of Artifice
Three Novelettes
By Anaïs Nin
· Introduction by Laura Frost

Swallow Press’s reissue of Winter of Artifice, with a new introduction by Laura Frost, presents an important opportunity to consider anew the work of Anaïs Nin who laid the groundwork for later writers, but whom critics frequently dismiss as solipsistic or overblown.

Ladders to Fire
By Anaïs Nin
· Introduction by Benjamin Franklin V
· Foreword by Gunther Stuhlmann

Anaïs 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.

Seduction of the Minotaur
By Anaïs Nin
· Introduction by Anita Jarczok

“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

The Novel of the Future
By Anaïs Nin
· Introduction by Deirdre Bair

In The Novel of the Future, Anaïs 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.

Under a Glass Bell
By Anaïs Nin
· Introduction by Elizabeth Podnieks

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.

A Spy in the House of Love
By Anaïs Nin
· Introduction by Anita Jarczok

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.

Mirages
The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1939–1947
By Anaïs Nin
· Edited by Paul Herron
· Introduction by Kim Krizan
· Preface 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. 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.

Cities of the Interior
By Anaïs Nin

Ladders to Fire, Children of the Albatross, The Four-Chambered Heart, A Spy in the House of Love, Seduction of the Minotaur. Haunting and hypnotic, these five novels by Anaïs Nin began in 1946 to appear in quiet succession. Though published separately over the next fifteen years, the five were conceived as a continuous experience—a continuous novel like Proust’s, real and flowing as a river.The

Waste of Timelessness and Other Early Stories
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.

Novel of the Future
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.

Under a Glass Bell
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.

Spy in the House of Love
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.

Antonin Artaud
Man of Vision
By Bettina L. Knapp
· Preface by Anaïs Nin

The extraordinary actor–director–writer who developed his talent for self-torture into art to become one of the most vital creative forces of the century.

D. H. Lawrence
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.

Collages
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.

Winter of Artifice
Three Novelettes
By Anaïs Nin

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

Seduction of the Minotaur
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

Ladders to Fire
By Anaïs Nin
· Foreword by Gunther Stuhlmann

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.

The Four-Chambered Heart
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.

Children of the Albatross
By Anaïs Nin

Children of the Albatross is divided into two sections: “The Sealed Room” focuses on the dancer Djuna and a set of characters, chiefly male, who surround her; “The Café” brings together a cast of characters already familiar to Nin’s readers, but it is their meeting place that is the focal point of the story.

House of Incest
By Anaïs Nin
· Introduction by Allison Pease
· Foreword by Gunther Stuhlmann

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.