巴黎是怎样的一个符号？是幽雅的香水，高卢人特有的精制轮廓，左岸焦炭味飘浮的咖啡，抑或情人浪漫的眼角。欲望是什么？是低胸晚装下深陷的乳沟，绅士单手托着的香槟酒中最暧昧的泡沫，无人问津时黯然销魂的情色。两种特质交融出法兰西天空下最动人的一道风景，那是美丽更是繁重，是情切更似激荡。----暗地妖娆<欲望巴黎>

叫Anaïs的人本来就少, 叫Anaïs又出了名的人更是少之又少. 其实很早就知道有一个和我同名的名女人(当然是在我被叫做Anaïs之后), 只是从来没有想知道她究竟干过点什么. 记得去年Leurion先生问我想不想做个名人, 我说不, 一点不想. 讲这种话大概是要被鄙视的. 直到上个月在<无穷动>里又一次听到洪晃提起这个名字, 才想要去了解一下这个和我同名的女人. 洪晃是个有趣的女人, 她嘴里说出来的女人应该也是不寻常的罢.

上面暗地妖娆的一段话,恰似一块巨大的环形幕布, 烘托出这位神奇女子的不寻常的经历.

French-born novelist, passionate eroticist and short story writer, who gained international fame with her journals. Spanning the years from 1931 to 1974, they record an account of one woman's voyage of self-discovery. "It's all right for a woman to be, above all, human. I am a woman first of all." (from The Diary of Anaïs Nin, vol. I, 1966) Anaïs Nin was largely ignored until the 1960s. Today she is regarded as one of the leading women writers of the 20th-century. She has become a source of inspiration for those who are ready to take risks in their life for the sake of art and adventure.

Anaïs Nin was born in Neuilly, France, to artistic parents. After a cosmopolitan childhood in Europe, Nin came to the New York City with her Danish mother and two brothers in 1914. Her father, the Cuban-born composer-pianist Joaquin Nin, had deserted the family when Nin was 11. He had seduced Nin in her childhood according to some sources - however, Nin's work combined truth and fiction, and some of the details surrounding her life are part of her myth. Largely self-educated, she spent her youth reading in public libraries and keeping a journal. She initially wrote in French and did not begin to write in English until she was seventeen.

"I had expected a man for the demonstration of sixty-six ways of making love. Henry barters over the price. The women smile. The big one has bold features, raven black hair in curls which almost hide her face. The smaller one has a pale face with blonde hair. They are like mother and daughter. They wear high-heeled shoes, black stockings with garters at the thighs, and loose open kimono. They lead us upstairs. They walk ahead, swinging their hips." (from Journals 1931-1934)

In New York Nin studied art, and married in 1923 Hugh Guiler. He illustrated later her books under the pseudonym Ian Hugo, and became known as an engraver and filmmaker. They moved to Paris, France, when she started writing fiction in the 1930s. In France Nin became associated with the villa Seurat group, which included Henry Miller. He and Nin both influenced each other in their work - their correspondence was published in 1987 as A LITERARY PASSION. With Otto Rank she worked as a lay analyst and was his lover. Her career as a writer started with the publication of D.H. LAWRENCE: AN UNPROFESSIONAL STUDY. It was followed by several books, including her master work HOUSE OF INCEST (1936), a prose poem dealing with psychological torments concerning her relationship with Miller and his wife, June, WINTER OF ARTIFICE (1939), about daughter's relationship to her father, and a collection of short stories, UNDER A GLASS BELL (1944).

The series CITIES OF THE INTERIOR included CHILDREN OF THE ALBATROSS (1947), LADDERS TO FIRE (1946), CHILDREN OF THE ALBATROSS (1947), THE FOUR-CHAMBERED HEART (1950), and A SPY IN THE HOUSE OF LOVE (1954). The series focused on different female types and followed their lives through lovers, art, and analysis. All of Nin's writings have an erotic quality - "sensuality is a secret power in my body," she once wrote. In the early 1940s she wrote a series of specifically sexual pieces, which were edited and published posthumously as DELTA OF VENUS (1977) and LITTLE BIRDS (1979). Nin wrote the stories in Delta of Venus for a dollar a page in the 1940s.

With the understanding Hugh Guiler Nin enjoyed a secure marriage for over 50 years. He stayed out of the way of her extramarital life during a series of affairs with Henry Miller, Otto Rank, Gore Vidal, Edmund Wilson. Nin was able to have in California a second husband, Rupert Pole, and the bicostal bigamous marriage had her commuting between New York and California for at least 25 years.

In the early 1940s she returned to New York, where she set up the Gemor Press and published her works at her own expense. In the 1940s and 1950s she became allied with such young writers as Robert Duncan, Gore Vidal, and James Leo Herlihy. In the 1960s Nin gained fame with her diaries, which arose interest in her earlier works. Nin's diary covers the years from 1931 to 1977 and provides an insight into her development as a woman and artist. The first volume appeared when she was 63. More than a biographical document, the diary is a work of art. Each volume has an unifying theme. Individuals and scenes are vivid, conversations are presented in dialogue, lengthy observations are juxtaposed with cryptic comments.

Although Nin was criticized as a narcissist, the feminist perspective of her works, psychological insight, and her search for self-knowledge made her a popular lecturer in the universities across the U.S. In 1975 appeared A WOMAN SPEAKS: THE LECTURES, SEMINARS, AND INTERVIEWS OF ANAÏS NIN, where Nin dissociated herself from the political activism of feminist. She did not have faith in exchanges if systems, "because systems are corruptible", and advocated journal keeping as a preliminary requirement for a liberated self. "So I feel the great changes in the world will come from a great change in our consciousness," she wrote. The last volumes of her diaries appeared posthumously in the 1980s. Nin died on January 14, 1977, in Los Angeles. "I only believe in fire. Life. Fire. Being myself on fire I set others on fire. Never death. Fire and life. Les Jeux."