Originally published in book form in 1954, this authoritative edition of Anais Nin's A Spy in the House of Love contains Nin's introduction, character descriptions, publishing history, and an author's chronology.A Spy in the House of Love contains some of Nin's best poetic prose. The main character, Sabina, realizes that she is a composite of many selves, each one seeking identity within relationships with five very different men, and while she seeks to live out each part of herself, she also craves unity, setting the stage for the battle for self-awareness.Consider the following passage, which describes Sabina's encounter with Philip, whom she has met in a nightclub:"The trembling premonitions shaking the hand, the body, made dancing unbearable, waiting unbearable, smoking and talking unbearable. Soon would come the untamable seizure of sensual cannibalism, the joyous epilepsies."They fled from the eyes of the world, the singer's prophetic, harsh, ovarian prologues. Down the rusty bars of ladders to the undergrounds of the night propitious to the first man and woman at the beginning of the world, where there were no words by which to possess each other, no music for serenades, no presents to court with, no tournaments to impress and force a yielding, no secondary instruments, no adornments, necklaces, crowns to subdue, but only one ritual, a joyous, joyous, joyous, joyous impaling of woman on man's sensual mast."Part realism and part fantasy, A Spy in the House of Love achieves a level of writing that is very rare in the English language. Anais Nin (1903-1977) was born in Neuilly-Sur-Seine, near Paris, and was the daughter of a renowned pianist and composer, Joaquin Nin. Abandoned by her father in 1913, she and her family traveled to New York, where she began her now famous diary, comprised of some 35,000 pages over a period of six decades. When the first volume of 'The Diary of Anais Nin' was published in 1966, it began Nin's meteoric surge to fame. However, often overlooked are the works of fiction she created, beginning with 'The House of Incest' in 1936, which was followed by a then-banned edition of a collection of novellas under the title 'The Winter of Artifice.' This original edition has been republished for the first time in 2007. Perhaps Nin's most acclaimed fiction is the series of short stories in 'Under a Glass Bell,' which she self-published in New York during the 1940s when no commercial publisher would take the risk. She then began a series of novels that were interconnected and finally collected into one volume entitled 'Cities of the Interior.' Her final novel was 'Collages,' about which Henry Miller said, "Even the finest collages fall apart with time; these will not."Anais Nin was one of the 20th century's most innovative and compelling artist, and now her works are finally appearing in digital format.
