Ladders To Fire - Softcover

Nin, Ana�s

3.73

1,172 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804001812 ISBN 13: 9780804001816

Publisher: Swallow Press, 1959

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Ana�s Nin’s Ladders to Fire interweaves the stories of several women, each emotionally inhibited in her own way: through self-doubt, fear, guilt, moral drift, and distrust. The novel follows their inner struggles to overcome these barriers to happiness and wholeness. The author’s own experiences, as recorded in her famous diaries, supplied the raw material for her fiction. It was her intuitive, experimental, and always original style that transformed one into the other. Nin herself memorably claimed that it was the fiction writer who edited the diary.”

Ladders to Fire explores the erotic attachments of four young women. Nin described it as a "woman's struggle to understand her own nature." It began a five-volume "continuous novel," Cities of the Interior, which includes Children of the Albatross (1947), The Four-Chambered Heart (1950), A Spy in the House of Love (1954), and Solar Barque (1959).Set in the pre-war, expatriate Paris of Henry Miller, this novel which shocked Nin’s contemporaries draws its inspiration from her confessional diaries. Although Nin found in her diaries a profound mode of self-creation and confession, she could not reveal this intimate record of her own experiences during her lifetime. Instead, she turned to fiction, where her stories and novels became artistic distillations” of her secret diaries. This 1995 reissue of of the 1946 novel Ladders to Fire has a new cover and foreword.

This Swallow Press reissue of Ladders to Fire includes a new introduction by Nin scholar Benjamin Franklin V, as well as Gunther Stuhlmann’s classic foreword to the 1995 edition.

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From the Back Cover:

After struggling with her own press and printing her own works, Anais Nin succeeded in getting Ladders to Fire accepted and Published in 1946. This recognition marked a milestone in her life and career. Admitted into the fellowship of American novelists, she maintained the individuality of her literary style. She resisted realistic writing and drew on the experience and intuitions of her diary to forge a novelistic style emphasizing free association, the language of emotion, spontaneity, and improvisation. Ladders to Fire is the first volume of Nin's celebrated series of novels called Cities of the Interior. For Anais Nin, her writing and her life were not separable, they were both part of the same experience. She claimed that "it is the fiction writer who edited the diary".

About the Author:

Anais Nin—the celebrated novelst, diarist, and short story writer—was born in France and spent her childhood in various parts of Europe and in New York. Nin returned to New York just before the outbreak of World War II, and she spent the rest of her life living there and in Paris and Los Angeles. Her work is characterized by a interest in the subconscious. Her five novels in the Cities of the Interior series focus on different female types and follow their lives through lovers, art, and analysis. In 1973 Nin received an honorary doctorate from Philadelphia College of Art. She was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1974.

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