Classic Erotica: Delta of Venus by Anais Nin
About The Book:
In Delta of Venus, 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.
I love this book. It was written for a private collector, who hired Anais to personally write him smut to get off to. Which means it’s graphic, intense, sometimes twisted and startling, and often hot. The stories are all fairly short, and some are far sexier than others. But they’re all worth reading through, many of them over and over again.
To be clear, there is rape, incest, and some dead bodies in this collection. It’s the sort of erotica that’s designed to push limits of what we feel comfortable fantasizing about. It’s not like her sweeter more memoir style collections. It’s graphic, intense, and often fucked up. You’ll probably find it hot.
Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) was born in Paris and aspired at an early age to be a writer. An influential artist and thinker, she wrote primarily fiction until 1964, when her last novel, Collages, was published. She wrote The House of Incest, a prose-poem (1936), three novellas collected in The Winter of Artifice (1939), short stories collected in Under a Glass Bell (1944), and a five-volume continuous novel consisting of Ladders to Fire (1946), Children of the Albatross (1947), The Four-Chambered Heart (1950), A Spy in the House of Love (1954), and Seduction of the Minotaur (1961). These novels were collected as Cities of the Interior (1974). She gained commercial and critical success with the publication of the first volume of her diary (1966); to date, fifteen diary volumes have been published. Her most commercially successful books were her erotica published as Delta of Venus (1977) and Little Birds (1979). Today, her books are appearing digitally, most notably The Portable Anaïs Nin (2011).
