Little Birds

Little Birds is Anaïs Nin's second published work of erotica, published in 1979 (two years after her death)^[1] but apparently written in the early 1940s when she was part of a group "writing pornography for a dollar a day."^[2]

The book is a collection of thirteen short stories. The sexual topics covered are quite varied from pedophilia to lesbianism and many of the same characters that appear in Delta of Venus, her first published book of erotica, make appearances here.

During this period Nin was "madam of this snobbish literary house of prostitution" for a client who examined sexual activity "to the exclusion of aspects which are the fuel that ignites it. Intellectual, imaginative, romantic, emotional."^[3] In her 1976 preface to Delta of Venus she said "I had a feeling that Pandora's box contained the mysteries of woman's sensuality, so different from man's and for which man's language was inadequate.... Here in the erotica I was writing to entertain, under pressure from a client who wanted me to "leave out the poetry." I believed that my style was derived from a reading of men's works. For this reason I long felt that I had compromised my feminine self. I put the erotica aside. Rereading it these many years later, I see that my own voice was not completely suppressed. In numerous passages I was intuitively using a woman's language, seeing sexual experience from a woman's point of view. I finally decided to release the erotica for publication because it shows the beginning efforts of a woman in a world that had been the domain of men."^[3]

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