The Veiled Woman

A woman sits in a café in Paris and watches another woman across the room — and in that observation, Anaïs Nin generates one of the most precise and unsettling short pieces of prose she ever wrote. The Veiled Woman gathers some of Nin’s most essential short fiction and diary extracts, offering a concentrated introduction to a writer who spent her entire career attempting to capture female desire and female consciousness in forms that had never quite existed before she created them.

Nin’s reputation was made by her diaries — enormous, decades-spanning records of her inner life and her extraordinary circle of friends and lovers — but her fiction, at its best, achieves something different: a compression of sensation and thought that the diary format cannot provide. These short pieces show that compression at its most intense.

This Penguin Little Black Classic is the ideal starting point for readers new to Nin — and a perfect companion for those who know the diaries and want to encounter the fiction. Published by Penguin.