Little Birds

The trunk that produced Delta of Venus wasn't empty. When that 1977 collection became the bestseller of Nin's whole career — in press as she died, famous within months — the remaining commissioned stories were gathered as Little Birds in 1979. The origin is the one recorded in the wartime diary: the collector, relayed through Henry Miller, paying by the page and demanding less poetry; Nin and a circle of broke writers feeding the appetite while smuggling their sensibilities past the instructions.

Read after Delta, the second collection is the lighter panel: briefer pieces, more comedy, the writer's eye for character and setting doing much of the work the commission never asked for. Nin's own late verdict on the project — that writing to order had produced, almost accidentally, a female language for desire — reads even more clearly here, story by small story.

Thirteen stories from the 1940s commission, in settings the diary readers will recognize — Paris ateliers and parks, beach towns, ships, hotel rooms — each built around Nin's constant: desire observed from the inside of a woman's experience, with the psychology allowed to matter as much as the acts. The title story opens the collection; the pieces run short, and the register spans tender to comic to disquieting, the anonymity of the original commission licensing a range her signed fiction rarely used.