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Advance praise for

Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1939 – 1947

“Henry Miller called her a ‘masterpiece.’ Leaning on his elbows across the dinner table one evening, he laughed as he told me, Anaïs was the greatest ‘fabulist’ he had ever known and one ‘possessed of the nine lives of the cat.’ Nin herself referred to her lies as ‘mensonges vitals’ by which she meant the lies that give life. Her brother Joaquin Nin likened Anaïs to a ‘steel hummingbird’ and Edmund Wilson said she was a ‘practical little Franco-Spanish housewife’ who was, at the same time, ‘a lovely little nymph who was not quite a human being.’

“As for myself, she was a myth in her own time, the Scheherazade of the diary genre, and epitomizes Harold Bloom’s observation in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, to wit, ‘Romance, literary and human, depends on partial or imperfect knowledge.’ I leave it to readers of Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1939–1947 to draw their own conclusions.”

—Barbara Kraft, author of Anaïs Nin: The Last Days and The Restless Spirit: Journal of a Gemini, with a preface by Anaïs Nin

“Mirages comprises . . . anything but. Instead, here, editor Paul Herron, like a spy in the great house of love, offers up the utterly unexpurgated Nin, and we have Salome, The Diarist, at last without her many veils. Till now, but for tantalizing glimpses, Anaïs the woman—carnal, conflicted, endlessly seeking completion through flesh and heart—has appeared only in heavily redacted snippets. In Mirages, she stands before us, stripped bare, unmasked, triumphant, among her cast of sacred and noires bêtes (Gore Vidal, Henry Miller, et al.) now revealed, by name, as who and what they were to her. Mirages exposes, reveals and humanizes Nin as much more than the sum of heavily edited parts.”

—Elizabeth Boleman-Herring, author of The Visitors’ Book (or Silva Rerum): An Erotic Fable

“Mirages provides a treasure of newly disclosed Nin sentiments. Nin transcends self-reflection and offers a glimpse into what women feel but are rarely able to articulate, whether about daily experiences, or love gained and lost. With intense passion, her powerfully seductive prose shares insights, observations, and confessions about the human psyche. Highly recommended.”

—Diana Raab, author of Dear Anaïs: My Life in Poems for You