“We write to taste life twice,
in the moment
and in retrospect.”

—Anaïs Nin

I was a first-year student in community college the first time I read Anaïs Nin. My best friend Gigi and I used to have a Tuesday tradition: We’d start at the bookstore to peruse the (never changing!) erotica section. Then we’d split a pupu platter complete with a tiny little open-fire skewer cooker. After dinner, we’d go to the $2.50 movie at the cheap seats theater. The entire evening of entertainment cost us about $9 a week. It was heavenly!

When we weekly checked on the erotica section of our tiny local bookstore we found very few options. These were the days of “Best Women’s Erotica” and “Best Erotica” short story collections. That was it. The whole variety.

But we did eventually find Delta of Venus. And the rest, as they say, is romance author history.

Well, I’m a romance author. Gigi wins. She has an OnlyFans.

Annnnnnny-way. Here’s your blurb!

Delta of Venus by Anaïs Nin

Fifteen short stories by Anaïs Nin published posthumously in 1977 - though largely written in the 1940s as erotica for a private collector.

In Delta of Venus Anaïs Nin penned 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. Delta of Venus is an extraordinarily rich and exotic collection from the master of erotic writing.

What are you reading this week?