Juno Temple
Little Birds, 2020

Sophia Al-Maria on Her TV Melodrama Inspired By Anaïs Nin’s Erotic Stories

Artist, author, and filmmaker Sophia Al-Maria speaks to AnOther about Little Birds, her new TV series coming soon to Sky Atlantic

30 MINUTES WITH Juno Temple / ‘Blackpool is like Reno, not flashy like Vegas, there’s a sense of Arcadian gambling’

Anaïs Nin / Little birds / Preface

by miss rosen
JULY 30, 2020

In the early 1940s, Anaïs Nin was part of a literary group penning erotic novels for a dollar a day, amassing a series of short stories published as Little Birds in 1979, two years after her death. “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,” Nin said in the preface to her 1976 masterwork, The Delta of Venus.

Anaïs Nin / Sex and the open stacks

Anaïs Nin

Anaïs Nin

Sex and the open stacks

By Kathy Wilson

Ah, the public library circa 1982. The workhorse institution of the community, a perpetually underfunded repository of stuffy reference books, underpaid librarians, used book sales, tax forms, broken microfiche readers -- and pornography.

Lurking right there in the open stacks of my suburban public library was enough smut to blow my impressionable 13-year-old mind. My life changed the day I spied Anaïs Nin's "Delta of Venus" on a shelf in the fiction section. I quizzically studied the photograph on the cover. It showed a girl in strange clothing contorted on an old armchair, her dress hiked up to her hips, revealing a stocking attached to a lacy undergarment. "Erotica" the cover said. I cracked open the book to see what was inside.

Anaïs Nin / Little birds / Preface

Anaïs Nin

Little birds

Preface

Anaïs Nin / Pájaros de fuego / Prefacio

It is an interesting fact that very few writers have of their own accord sat down to write erotic tales or confessions. Even in France, where it is believed that the erotic has such an important role in life, the writers who did so were driven by necessity — the need of money.