An interpretation of the life and works of the diarist and erotic writer, Anais Nin seen through varies mediums including mirrors, glass and light-box installations.

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. As a child suffering abandonment by her father, Anaïs 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 Anaïs 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.

The Drowned Muse is a study of the extraordinary destiny, in the history of European culture, of an object which could seem, at first glance, quite ordinary in the history of European culture. It tells the story of a mask, the cast of a young girl's face entitled "L'Inconnue de la Seine," the Unknown Woman of the Seine, and its subsequent metamorphoses as a cultural figure. Legend has it that the "Inconnue" drowned herself in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century. The forensic scientist tending to her unidentified corpse at the Paris Morgue was supposedly so struck by her allure that he captured in plaster the contours of her face. This unknown girl, also referred to as "The Mona Lisa of Suicide", has since become the object of an obsessive interest that started in the late 1890s, reached its peak in the 1930s, and continues to reverberate today. Aby Warburg defines art history as "a ghost story for grown-ups." This study is similarly "a ghost story for grown-ups", narrating the aura of a cultural object that crosses temporal, geographical, and linguistic frontiers. It views the "Inconnue" as a symptomatic expression of a modern world haunted by the earlier modernity of the nineteenth century. It investigates how the mask's metamorphoses reflect major shifts in the cultural history of the last two centuries, approaching the "Inconnue" as an entry point to understand a phenomenon characteristic of 20th- and 21st-century modernity: the translatability of media. Doing so, this study mobilizes discourses surrounding the "Inconnue", casting them as points of negotiation through which we may consider the modern age.

Essays, lectures, and interviews—on everything from gender relations to Ingmar Bergman to adventure travel—from the renowned diarist. In this collection, the author known for “one of the most remarkable diaries in the history of letters” shares her unique perceptions of people, places, and the arts (Los Angeles Times). In the opening group of essays, “Women and Men,” Anaïs Nin provides the kind of sensitive insights into the feminine psyche and relations between the sexes that are a hallmark of her work. In “Writing, Music, and Films,” she speaks as an artist and critic—in book and film reviews, an essay on the composer Edgard Varèse, a lecture on Ingmar Bergman, and the story of her printing press. In the final section, “Enchanted Places,” Nin records her travels to such destinations as Fez and Agadir in Morocco, Bali, the New Hebrides, and New Caledonia—and she concludes with a charming vignette titled “My Turkish Grandmother.”

"For readers unfamiliar with her subject, Maryanne Raphael's biography, Anais Nin, The Voyage Within, is a sensitive, uncomplicated introduction to the life and work of one of the 20th century's most quintessentially feminine artists. For Nin devotees, the biography is a refresher course taking us back through the vast material of the Diaries and novels that enchanted and inspired our love. Raphael accepts Nin entirely on her own terms. Thanks to a warm, personal relationship with Rupert Pole, Nin's surviving husband and executor of her estate, Raphael opens up some of the mystery that has hitherto surrounded Nin's relationship with her husbands-an aspect of Nin's life that was never explicitly described in the original Diaries. The result is a multi-dimensional portrait in which Nin's two selves, artist and woman are fully integrated. Nin the woman consciously chooses to realize female desire, give form to female imagination, always loving as she remains completely focused on birthing a new unabashedly feminine literature. Thank you, Maryanne!" -Dolores Brandon, Author of IN THE SHADOW OF MADNESS, A Memoir

"A Poetry and Art book based on one woman's journey through life but at the same time reflects a journey every woman takes and experiences at some point in her life." -- from author's website.

Hysteria is alive and well in our present time and is apparently spreading contagiously: especially the second decade of the twenty-first century has displayed an ever-increasing interest in the term. A quick Google search opens the gates to sheer endless swathes of discussions on hysteria, covering almost every aspect of public discourses. The arts—as it is often in such cases—seem conspicuously involved in and engaged with this hysterical discourse. Surprisingly, while the strong academic interest in hysteria throughout the twentieth century and most prominently at the turn of the century is well known and much discussed, the study of how these discourses have continued well into twenty-first-century art practices, is largely pressing on a blind spot. It is the aim of this volume to illustrate how hysteria was already well established within the arts alongside and at times even separately from the much-covered medical studies, and reveal how those current artistic practices very much continue a century spanning cross-fertilization between hysteria and the arts.