Apprenticed to Venus

Apprenticed to Venus

Author: Tristine Rainer

Publisher: Arcade

Published: 2019-07-16

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781948924191

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"Mysterious, glamorous, intellectual . . . with vivid language and lush scenes, this memoir makes for an exciting read." —Bust Magazine. Named a "Best Summer Read" by Elle Magazine! A Revealing Look at the Mentorship—and Manipulation—of Anaïs Nin In 1962, eighteen-year-old Tristine Rainer was sent on an errand to Anaïs Nin’s West Village apartment. The chance meeting would change the course of her life and begin her years as Anaïs’s accomplice, keeping her mentor’s confidences—including that of her bigamy—even after Anaïs Nin’s death and the passing of her husbands, until now. Set in the underground literary worlds of Manhattan and Los Angeles during the sixties and seventies, Tristine charts her coming of age under the guidance of the infamous Anaïs Nin: author of the erotic bestseller Delta of Venus, lover to Henry Miller, Parisian diarist, and feminist icon of the sexual revolution. As an inexperienced college-bound girl from the San Fernando Valley, Tristine was dazzled by the sophisticated bohemian author and sought her instruction in becoming a woman. Tristine became a fixture of Anaïs’s inner circle, implicated in the mysterious author’s daring intrigues—while simultaneously finding her own path through love, lust, and loss. From personal memories to dramatized scenarios based on Anaïs’s revelations to the author, Apprenticed to Venus blurs the lines between novel and memoir to bring to life a seductive and entertaining character—the pioneer whose mantra was, "A woman has as much right to pleasure as a man!"


The Birth of Venus

The Birth of Venus

Author: Sarah Dunant

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2004-11-30

Total Pages: 426

ISBN-13: 1588364429

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Alessandra Cecchi is not quite fifteen when her father, a prosperous cloth merchant, brings a young painter back from northern Europe to decorate the chapel walls in the family’s Florentine palazzo. A child of the Renaissance, with a precocious mind and a talent for drawing, Alessandra is intoxicated by the painter’s abilities. But their burgeoning relationship is interrupted when Alessandra’s parents arrange her marriage to a wealthy, much older man. Meanwhile, Florence is changing, increasingly subject to the growing suppression imposed by the fundamentalist monk Savonarola, who is seizing religious and political control. Alessandra and her native city are caught between the Medici state, with its love of luxury, learning, and dazzling art, and the hellfire preaching and increasing violence of Savonarola’s reactionary followers. Played out against this turbulent backdrop, Alessandra’s married life is a misery, except for the surprising freedom it allows her to pursue her powerful attraction to the young painter and his art. The Birth of Venus is a tour de force, the first historical novel from one of Britain’s most innovative writers of literary suspense. It brings alive the history of Florence at its most dramatic period, telling a compulsively absorbing story of love, art, religion, and power through the passionate voice of Alessandra, a heroine with the same vibrancy of spirit as her beloved city.


Apprenticed to Venus

Apprenticed to Venus

Author: Tristine Rainer

Publisher: Skyhorse

Published: 2017-07-11

Total Pages: 403

ISBN-13: 1628727799

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A Revealing Look at the Mentorship—and Manipulation—of Anaïs Nin In 1962, eighteen-year-old Tristine Rainer was sent on an errand to Anaïs Nin’s West Village apartment. The chance meeting would change the course of her life and begin her years as Anaïs’s accomplice, keeping her mentor’s confidences—including that of her bigamy—even after Anaïs Nin’s death and the passing of her husbands, until now. Set in the underground literary worlds of Manhattan and Los Angeles during the sixties and seventies, Tristine charts her coming of age under the guidance of the infamous Anaïs Nin: author of the erotic bestseller Delta of Venus, lover to Henry Miller, Parisian diarist, and feminist icon of the sexual revolution. As an inexperienced college-bound girl from the San Fernando Valley, Tristine was dazzled by the sophisticated bohemian author and sought her instruction in becoming a woman. Tristine became a fixture of Anaïs’s inner circle, implicated in the mysterious author’s daring intrigues—while simultaneously finding her own path through love, lust, and loss. In what Kirkus calls a “spicy and saucy hybrid of memoir and novel,” Apprenticed to Venus brings to life a seductive and entertaining character —the pioneer whose mantra was, “A woman has as much right to pleasure as a man!” An intimate look at the intricacies—and risks—of the female mentor-protégé relationship, Tristine Rainer’s Apprenticed to Venus stories her deep friendship, for good or ill, with a pivotal historical figure.


Anaïs Nin

Anaïs Nin

Author: Hourly History

Publisher:

Published: 2019-05-21

Total Pages: 44

ISBN-13: 9781099544293

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Anaïs NinAnaïs Nin was an influential and acclaimed writer best known for her diaries that cover six decades from the 1910s to the 1970s. In addition to her famous journals, her works include novels, essays, poetry, studies, and erotica-many of which remain popular to this day. As one of the first prominent female authors of erotica, Nin led a controversial life that was subject to many rumors. Her fearlessness when it came to tackling taboo topics such as incest, sexual abuse, and extra-marital affairs would earn her both staunch supporters and zealous critics. Inside you will read about...✓ Early Years of Abuse ✓ Seducing her Father ✓ Delta of Venus ✓ Anaïs' Double Life and Husbands ✓ The Diary of Anaïs Nin ✓ Late Life and Death And much more! In the 1960s, Anaïs Nin's unconventional lifestyle, which included two simultaneous husbands and numerous casual partners, turned her into a feminist icon. Since then, her legacy as a scandalous woman and an exceptional author has continued to captivate audiences.


African Queen

African Queen

Author: Rachel Holmes

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2009-03-25

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 0307510735

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Saartjie Baartman was twenty-one years old when she was taken from her native South Africa and shipped to London. Within weeks, the striking African beauty was the talk of the social season of 1810–hailed as “the Hottentot Venus” for her exquisite physique and suggestive semi-nude dance. As her fame spread to Paris, Saartjie became a lightning rod for late Georgian and Napoleonic attitudes toward sex and race, exploitation and colonialism, prurience and science. In African Queen, Rachel Holmes recounts the luminous, heartbreaking story of one woman’s journey from slavery to stardom. Born into a herding tribe known as the Eastern Cape Khoisan, Saartjie was barely out of her teens when she was orphaned and widowed by colonial war and forced aboard a ship bound for England. A pair of clever, unscrupulous showmen dressed her up in a body stocking with a suggestive fringe and put her on the London stage as a “specimen” of African beauty and sexuality. The Hottentot Venus was an overnight sensation. But celebrity brought unexpected consequences. Abolitionists initiated a lawsuit to win Saartjie’s freedom, a case that electrified the English public. In Paris, a team of scientists subjected her to a humiliating public inspection as they probed the mystery of her sexual allure. Stared at, stripped, pinched, painted, worshipped, and ridiculed, Saartjie came to symbolize the erotic obsession at the heart of colonialism. But beneath the costumes and the glare of publicity, this young Khoisan woman was a person who had been torn from her own culture and sacrificed to the whims of fashionable Europe. Nearly two centuries after her death, Saartjie made headlines once again when Nelson Mandela launched a campaign to have her remains returned to the land of her birth. In this brilliant, vividly written book, Rachel Holmes traces the full arc of Saartjie’s extraordinary story–a story of race, eros, oppression, and fame that resonates powerfully today.


Incest

Incest

Author: Anaïs Nin

Publisher: HMH

Published: 1993-09-16

Total Pages: 443

ISBN-13: 0547540787

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The trailblazing memoirist and author of Henry & June recounts her relationships with Henry Miller and others—including her own father. Anaïs Nin wrote in her uncensored diaries like they were a broad-minded confidante with whom she shared the liberating psychosexual dramas of her life. In this continuation of her notorious Henry & June, she recounts a particularly turbulent period between 1932 and 1934, and the men who dominated it: her protective husband, her therapist, and the poet Antonin Artaud. However, most consuming of all is novelist Henry Miller—a man whose genius, said Anaïs, was so demonic it could drive people insane. Here too, recounted in extraordinary detail, is the sexual affair she had with her father. At once loving, exciting, and vengeful, it was the ultimate social transgression for which Anaïs would eventually seek absolution from her analysts. “Before Lena Dunham there was Anaïs Nin. Like Dunham, she’s been accused of narcissism, sociopathy, and sexual perversion time and again. Yet even that comparison undercuts the strangeness and bravery of her work, for Nin was the first of her kind. And, like all truly unique talents, she was worshipped by some, hated by many, and misunderstood by most . . . A woman who’d spent decades on the bleeding edge of American intellectual life, a woman who had been a respected colleague of male writers who pushed the boundaries of acceptable sex writing. Like many great . . . experimentalists, she wrote for a world that did not yet exist, and so helped to bring it into being.” —The Guardian Includes an introduction by Rupert Pole


Anais Nin

Anais Nin

Author: Deirdre Bair

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 672

ISBN-13: 9780747525424

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"To live life as a dream" was Nin's motto, and she did so. She was a bigamist for more than thirty years, creating a "Lie Box" to help her keep her stories straight. And always she kept her diary, which eventually became one of the most astonishing renderings of a contemporary woman's life, noted as much for what she left out as for what she included. Bair's biography fills in the blanks and shows how Nin reflected the major themes that have come to characterize the latter half of the twentieth century: the quest for the self, the uses of psychoanalysis, and the determination of women to control their own sexuality.


Eats, Shoots & Leaves

Eats, Shoots & Leaves

Author: Lynne Truss

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2004-04-12

Total Pages: 119

ISBN-13: 1101218290

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We all know the basics of punctuation. Or do we? A look at most neighborhood signage tells a different story. Through sloppy usage and low standards on the internet, in email, and now text messages, we have made proper punctuation an endangered species. In Eats, Shoots & Leaves, former editor Lynne Truss dares to say, in her delightfully urbane, witty, and very English way, that it is time to look at our commas and semicolons and see them as the wonderful and necessary things they are. This is a book for people who love punctuation and get upset when it is mishandled. From the invention of the question mark in the time of Charlemagne to George Orwell shunning the semicolon, this lively history makes a powerful case for the preservation of a system of printing conventions that is much too subtle to be mucked about with.


Joachim Wtewael

Joachim Wtewael

Author: Anne W. Lowenthal

Publisher: Getty Publications

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 96

ISBN-13: 0892363045

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The Dutch history painter Joachim Wtewael is widely admired for his astonishing small paintings on copper. The Getty Museum's Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan is one of his finest works in this unusually demanding medium. Though only eight inches high, this Mannerist painting contains eleven figures in three different spaces, captured in a dramatically charged moment from the famous story told by Ovid in his Metamorphoses. The author's detailed analysis of Wtewael's painting also serves as a fine introduction to Dutch art of the Golden Age. Illustrated with seventy reproductions of paintings, drawings, etchings, and decorative objects, Anne W. Lowenthal's study ranges over the broad historical and cultural context in which Mars and Venus was created.


Your Life as Story

Your Life as Story

Author: Tristine Rainer

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 1998-04-13

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 0874779227

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In Your Life As Story, autobiography expert Tristine Rainer explains how we can all find the important messages in our lives. Like Mary Karr or Frank McCourt, we can shape those stories into dramatic narratives that are compelling to others. Blending literary scholarship with practical coaching, Rainer shares her remarkable techniques for finding the essentials of story structure within your life's scattered experiences. Most important, she explains how to treasure the struggles in your past and discover the meaning within those experiences to capture the unique myth at work in your life.