Anais Nin

Los Angeles composer Cindy Shapiro discusses a new stage production based on the diaries of Anaïs Nin.

Barbara Kraft, author of the memoir Henry Miller: The Last Days, interviews Henry Miller in 1979.

Memoirist Barbara Kraft reflects on her intimate friendships with Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller at the end of their lives.

A look at Anaïs Nin’s editor, John Ferrone, who has died at age 91, and how he affected Nin’s literary canon.

Australian scholar Jessica Gilbey discusses Anaïs Nin’s relationship with her mother and how it informed the maternal in her life and her art.

Anaïs Nin, coming from a musical family, not only embraced music, but incorporated it into her work. Listen to some of her favorite artists and learn what they meant to her.

Anaïs Nin wrote about her relationship with poet Lanny Baldwin in her diary, and until now we only knew her side of the story. A recently discovered memoir by Baldwin, however, tells a much different story.

Anaïs Nin often claimed in her later years that Henry Miller had no real effect on her writing despite their close alliance in the 1930s. This podcast will debunk that notion entirely, leaving us to wonder why Nin said this. Here we find answers and the evidence to support them.

Popular writer, poet and blogger Diana Raab discusses how Anaïs Nin and she have lived parallel lives, both beginning diaries at age ten after losing a loved one, and she tells us of a live Nin event coming up in January 2016.

Benjamin Franklin V began his study of Anaïs Nin in 1966 at the dawn of her fame and it continues today. Franklin provides listeners with a unique insight that come from not only a half century of study, but from his acquaintance with Nin herself. He discusses Nin’s incredible need for privacy, her need to control what was written about her, and the meaning and significance of her work.

How did a young girl who was the victim of sexual abuse and incest, who was shamed for any inclination towards sexuality, who got into a traditional marriage for the wrong reasons become a successful erotica writer and co-founder of the sex-positive, edgy Go Deeper Press—and what did Anaïs Nin have to do with it? Lana Fox’s road to personal and professional fulfillment is the result of her own dogged persistence, courage and amazing turns of events, but Nin’s writing was the catalyst that inspired her to redefine herself on every level. In this striking interview, Fox reveals all.

Did any shred of the famous love affair between diarist Anaïs Nin and novelist Henry Miller survive their cataclysmic breakup letters of 1942? Listen to how Nin visited Miller in a failed attempt to revive their friendship in 1947, and then how Nin felt betrayed by Miller’s consent to help his friend Alfred Perlès publish a book revealing details about the affair in 1955. When Miller won the obscenity trials in 1961, he suddenly became rich while Nin was on the brink of financial ruin. Did Miller come to her rescue, and if so, how did this change their relationship? Find out here.

Marina Ferrer, a young Brazilian poet, has Anaïs Nin in her blood, and, most notably, concentrates on Nin’s fiction, which is perhaps the most neglected aspect of her canon. In this interview, Ferrer tells us why and how Nin has helped her to understand herself more clearly, and how the fiction is a portal for all readers to do the same.

We asked our listeners to imagine they could ask Anais Nin any question they wanted to, and we used our extensive resources to research the answer we think she would have most likely given. Topics include Nin’s idea of paradise, her legendary fearlessness, which poets and painters influenced her work, what person she most regretted never having met, and whether it is true, as so many claim, that her soul mingles with those of ours. With the help of popular podcaster Anaín Bjorkquist of Sex Love Joy (http://anainbjorkquist.com/), full answers are given with references to evidence found in Nin’s published and unpublished work.

We asked our listeners to imagine they could ask Anais Nin any question they wanted to, and we used our extensive resources to research the answer we think she would have most likely given. Topics include Nin’s idea of paradise, her legendary fearlessness, which poets and painters influenced her work, what person she most regretted never having met, and whether it is true, as so many claim, that her soul mingles with those of ours. With the help of popular podcaster Anaín Bjorkquist of Sex Love Joy (http://anainbjorkquist.com/), full answers are given with references to evidence found in Nin’s published and unpublished work.

There are two mythical diaries that Nin readers have most likely heard of, but know little or nothing about: The Book of Pain and The Book of Music, both begun shortly after Nin was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer in late 1974. Having gone through horrific surgeries that left Nin “mutilated,” as she put it, she sought to write out her feelings and describe her tribulations in these two diaries. The podcast ends with Nin describing Balinese rituals surrounding death, a philosophy she found so comforting that she expressed it in the last sentence of the final volume of The Diary of Anaïs Nin: “Let me think of death as the Balinese do, as a flight to another life, a joyous transformation, a release of our spirit so it might visit all other lives.”

In response to a question I sometimes get "Who are you and how did you get this way?" I share my journey that began with the movie Henry and June and has resulted in Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin, 1939-1947–and everything in between. Find out more here.

Most people know how the Anais Nin-Henry Miller affair began, but do you know how it really ended? Find out here.

The “come as your madness” party which inspired the movie “Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome.”