Best known for her diaries, Anaïs Nin was also a remarkable writer of fiction, and Under a Glass Bell remains her finest collection of short stories.

First published in 1948, these stories occupy the same dreamlike territory as the surrealists while remaining unmistakably Nin's own: intensely psychological, erotic without being explicit, attentive to the symbolic life of objects, bodies and rooms. Reality is continually refracted through memory, fantasy and desire until the ordinary begins to feel mythic.

The collection ranges from quietly devastating portraits of emotional isolation to hallucinatory fables and surreal encounters. Rather than conventional plots, Nin builds emotional atmospheres in which identity seems fluid and perception itself becomes unstable. Admirers of Clarice Lispector, Leonora Carrington, Bruno Schulz or Djuna Barnes will recognise a similar commitment to interior life over external action. This early Swallow Press edition is an attractive mid-century printing of one of twentieth-century literature's great overlooked story collections.

Early Swallow Press paperback (copyright 1948) with Ian Hugo cover artwork. General shelf wear, rubbing and age toning to the wraps with light creasing; binding remains firm and the interior is clean.