Anaïs Nin’sLadders to Fireinterweaves 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 Fireis the first book of Nin’s continuous novel,Cities of the Interior,which also includesChildren of the Albatross,The Four-Chambered Heart,A Spy in the House of Love,andSeduction of the Minotaur.These loosely interlinked stories develop the characters and themes established in the first volume, leading slowly toward a resolution of inner turmoil and conflict.
This Swallow Press reissue ofLadders to Fireincludes a new introduction by Nin scholar Benjamin Franklin V, as well as Gunther Stuhlmann’s classic foreword to the 1995 edition.
Anaïs Nin’sLadders to Fireinterweaves 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.
“Anaïs Nin writes sensitively, with psychological training as well as insight…. She has a subcutaneous interest in her characters and Lawrence’s sixth sense.”—Times Literary Supplement
Anaïs Nin(1903–1977) is an iconic literary figure and one of the most notable experimental writers of the twentieth century. As one of the first women to explore female erotica, Nin revealed the inner desirel3
![Ladders to Fire [Paperback]](/itemImage/2/7/0/4/2_3669308.jpg "Ladders to Fire [Paperback]")