Bargains and a giveaway
Sky Blue Press is offering their titles, including their Anais Nin publications as well as the poetry of Stephane Mallarme and Daisy Aldan, at incredibly good prices. Worldwide shipping is available, and any buyer gets a priceless but free gift. Details are below (clicking on each icon will take you to the bookstore directly):
The Portable Anais Nin, by popular demand, will be available in print. In fact, we are using this sale to fund its publication. It is a chronological anthology of Nin’s most important writings, beginning at age 12 and continuing to just before her death. It is not only a handy guidebook to her work, it also follows her evolution as a writer and as a woman. Introduced and annotated by Benjamin Franklin V, it is projected to be in print by October 1, 2011. Sky Blue Press is taking advanced orders at a 25% discount for a limited time. (reg. $19.99): $14.99
The Winter of Artifice: a facsimile of the original 1939 Paris edition. This book had been out of print for nearly 70 years because it was banned in English-speaking countries and war had obliterated its distribution in France. This book is made from the original unexpurgated version. (hardcover, reg. $29.50): $5.99
One of 25 limited edition copies of the above title (signed and numbered by Benjamin Franklin V, including a rare glossy photo of Nin in 1939 Paris, and a facsimile of her handwritten diary entry describing how the edition was doomed; hardcover, reg. $100.00): $49.50 (less than 5 left).
A Cafe in Space, Volume 1, the special Nin centennial edition (2003), with unpublished diary excerpts, picture tours of Nin’s France, and articles by top Nin scholars. (reg. $15.00): $4.99
A Cafe in Space, Volume 2, which includes Nin’s “dream of Haiti,” a love affair with a culture and its members, essays on Nin’s writing, Henry Miller, and an excerpt from Anton Chekhov’s sister’s memoir. (reg. $15.00): $4.99
A Cafe in Space, Volume 3, which focuses on all three of the “musketeers”: Anais Nin, Henry Miller, and Lawrence Durrell, with studies by some of the world’s top scholars. (reg. $15.00): $4.99
A Cafe in Space, Volume 4 includes correspondence between Anais Nin, her agent Gunther Stuhlmann, and publisher Alan Swallow, which details the frustration, pain, hope, breakthroughs, betrayals, and heartbreak on the way to Nin’s ultimate fame; revealing letters between editor John Ferrone and Rupert Pole, who were at odds about how to present Nin’s first unexpurgated diary, Henry and June. (reg. $15.00): $4.99
A Cafe in Space, Volume 5 is a special issue with Nin’s unpublished critical writing, treatments of her fiction, and an extensive interview conducted at the height of her fame in 1969. (reg. $15.00): $4.99
A Cafe in Space, Volume 6 contains “Prelude to a Symphony,” recently discovered letters from Joaquin Nin to his daughter in 1933 around the time of the beginning of their incestuous affair. These letters make clear who the aggressor in this relationship was, and to what lengths Nin’s father went to entice his grown daughter to his lair in the south of France. Also included are several articles regarding Nin’s writing, Henry Miller, and poetry. (reg. $15.00): $4.99
The complete set of A Cafe in Space, Vols. 1 through 8 (reg. $99.50): $54.99 (only 3 complete sets left)
To Purify the Words of the Tribe: The Verse Poems of Stephane Mallarme, including his masterpiece “Un Coup De Des,” translated by Daisy Aldan, recoginized worldwide as Mallarme’s premier translator. This bilingual volume contains the French symbolist’s poems in both French and English, in the same visual format used by Mallarme himself, with expositions by Aldan. By far the best Mallarme translation on the market today. (reg. $19.95): $3.99
The Collected Poems of Daisy Aldan: 1933-2000. Daisy Aldan, who was Anais Nin’s close friends, was more than just a maverick Beat publisher and translator; she was also a very accomplished poet whose style was always evolving and always deeply spiritual. From her lush early poems to her minimalist later ones, this book chronicles the birth and evolution of one of the twentieth century’s best kept secrets. (reg. $29.95): $5.95 (there are less than 20 left)
Check out these and Sky Blue Press’s other titles at their new bookstore: http://www.skybluepress.org
To see all available digital titles by Anaïs Nin, visit our Nin e-bookstore.
To order books from the Nin house in Silver Lake (Los Angeles), visit the Anaïs Nin Trust bookstore.
Anaïs Nin’s Childhood Writings: The Storm
During a rainy period in June of 1916, Anaïs Nin, then 13 years of age, recorded the following in her diary (translated from the French in Linotte):
Thursday, June 8, 1916
It has rained without stopping all day today. Since I couldn’t go for a walk, I studied all my lessons, and then I began to look out the window. The rain kept falling and the drops fell ceaselessly with little “floc floc” sounds. Floc! Floc! the rain continued and this time I looked at the sky. The sky was full of clouds and that made me feel a little sad because it seemed to me those clouds were made expressly for me, as if to announce the clouds in my future life. Then I put those thoughts aside and left the window.
Sunday, June 11, 1916
Yesterday and today it has rained all day and we didn’t go to Riverside as we usually do. Saturday I spent the day sewing, reading, writing and thinking…
After Mass [this morning], I came home to breakfast and I spent the morning helping Maman. Then we had lunch and Maman took us to the cinema. After seeing 3 very nice films, we came home; it was 6. We had a little cold supper of sandwiches, cake and milk. That is how we spent Sunday.
Now I am thinking of tomorrow, Monday, and with sadness I see the school doors opening just enough to let us in, then closing on our dear freedom. Next come serious lessons, punishments, long stern faces, and above all the big blackboard with little chalk marks that dance before my eyes like little demons that are there just to torture the brain and tire the eyes. Then all that disappears and I sit here sadly, looking at the clock. 10 ½ hours separate me from the studies that I like but fear because of the teachers who scold and are so hard to please. (Linotte, pp. 129, 130-131)
Cover of Le Compagnon de L'oublie June 1916
To help her escape from the mundane and sometimes menacing daily life, young Anaïs absorbed herself in a monthly “magazine” entitled Le Compagnon de L’oublie. In her June 1916 “issue,” one of her works was a poem entitled “La Tempête” (“The Storm”), perhaps inspired by the long melancholy period of rain she wrote about in her diary. A translation appears below:
The Storm
In the country, the trees bend
Under the weight of the rain
That is falling in huge drops, under the name cheater,
For it brings a second night.
The sky clears, illuminating the earth for a second,
And then frightens the sleeping birds
With a great clap of thunder, and like bitter tears
The drops of rain become noisily mixed with those already fallen.
Nature, frightened, hides under the rustling leaves,
The flowers close under this brutal dew
And the soaked earth boasts of bearing this squall alone.
The birds, flapping their wings, lift themselves up
And murmur softly, “The Storm.”
On the sea, the holy anger becomes rage,
The waves beat furiously,
Sharing the sky’s fury.
The gloomy wind blows and beats the sails with a clamor,
While the ocean, in a supreme effort,
Hesitating and becoming one great wave,
A new voice conjuring,
In its sad and plaintive timbre,
A new force among the other cries,
And while the terrified seabirds seek a hiding place
In the depths of the few rocks along the coast,
The seamen in their crumbling boats
Shake their heads, saying, “Here is The Storm.”
And God contemplates His work,
A smile appearing in his white beard,
Seeing the fear,
In his black columns, becoming white,
And while the weather continues shuddering,
God says to Himself softly,
“Poor Man! He cannot see
Anything in my greatness.
Blind, undisciplined! Poor Man!
It’s a storm!”
Copyright The Anais Nin Trust; translation copyright Sky Blue Press. All rights reserved.
Daisy Aldan’s poem for Anaïs Nin
Daisy Aldan, longtime friend and collaborator with Anaïs Nin, wrote this moving poem in Anaïs’s memory after she’d succumbed to a long battle with cancer in 1977. This poem is taken from Aldan’s volume Collected Poems of Daisy Aldan. The poem, read by Aldan at a memorial for Nin in 1977, was also included in ANAIS: An International Journal, Vol. 10, edited by Gunther Stuhlmann, and in Anaïs Nin: A Book of Mirrors, edited by Paul Herron. Aldan remarked, “I was with her a few days before she died, and for this I am grateful. Although in great pain, although she knew she was dying, she was noble, with thoughts of others—of helping particular young writer friends. The dignity and beauty emanating from her startled me, and I experienced a kind of illumination around her as she lay in bed. Among her last words to me were that she was trying to establish a ‘a circle of good’ in the midst of much ugliness in the life of our time. She was a remarkable human being” ANAIS: An International Journal, Vol. 10, 77.
For Anaïs
d. January 14, 1977 at
midnight
1.
in the obscurity of the room
illumination: you and phosphorescent death
fusing
your voice
usurped by the wizard
our hands meeting
eloquent final
your embrace took me with you
a moment into the source of dream
where you were returning
phosphor / ash to gold
raying upward
from the Sea
2.
wound-up bone
prepares to explode
a coiled-in moment
prepares for sunburst
a fluttering
you awake into radiance
3.
You die
but you advance
as wings of light
move in the expanse
of sky
Unique as compassion.
in the air we breathe
we meet the light
you begin to shed
toward us
We had not dreamed that gone
you would be accessible
in the place
of intangible light
as new dimension
For crossing
you had to become bone/
cross: And that flame bore you beyond
the gravity of ground: joined
you to the light.
Daisy Aldan, all rights reserved