Delta of Venus

From influential feminist artist and essayist Anais Nin, Delta of Venus is one of the most important works of modern female erotica and "a joyous display of the erotic imagination" (The New York Times Book Review).In this story collection, Anais Nin pens 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 a master of erotic writing."Inventive, sophisticated . . . highly elegant naughtiness."--Cosmopolitan

“The unknown client who paid Anais Nin a dollar a page back in the 1940s to write erotica got his money's worth and to spare. After all, erotica is pornography with class, and Nih gives full measure of both: one feels her women who disrobe to some impetuous command were dressed in Paris, if not by Mainbocher at least in a Schiaparelli copy. Women wore garters then and men had buttons to their flies, articles now almost lost to the erotic imagination, as zippers and body stockings, too, will someday succumb to the march of progress. Nin boned up on Krafft-Ebing and the Kama Sutra to write these sensual episodes, and few rooms in the house of Eros are left unvisited, from pedophilia to sado-masochism. The truth is that she does it very well: slightly tongue-in-cheek, supremely unabashed - a woman of good family kicking up her French heels. This caviar was long denied the general public; once, no doubt, because of the puritanic temper of the times, and later because Nin feared that the words she wrote to order for a man (who proscribed poetry) would not throw any light on feminine sexuality. Luckily, she had second thoughts and released these pages before her recent death, and the only regret is that she won't be around to observe the delight they'll occasion.”

"The first American stories by a woman to celebrate sexuality with complete and open abandonment. . . A joyous display of the erotica imagination."--The New York Times Books Review "As readable and persuasive as some of the best of Isak Dinesen...A style as rich and compelling. . .as the best of the elegant French writers of erotica."--Los Angeles Times --

ANAÏS 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, nine published volumes of her Diary, and two volumes of erotica, Delta of Venus and Little Birds.

"Inventive, sophisticated . . . highly elegant naughtiness."-Cosmopolitan In Delta of Venus Ana

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