With all the recent attention on Anais Nin's controversial and sensational life, her real achievements as a literary artist are often overlooked. This collection of essays, with a comprehensive introduction by Suzanne Nalbantian, probes Nin's literary crafts in its psychological and stylistic dimensions.

The various critics such as Catherine Broderick, Anna Balakian, and Harriet Zinnes examine her artistry and identify the literary techniques that make her unique as a modernist writer in her fiction as well as in her poetic vision. Others like Philip Jason, Sharon Spencer, Suzette Henke, Valerie Harms, and Edmund Miller observe the transfer of her psychoanalytical positions to narrative.

This collection of essays includes two previously unpublished letters from her brother Joaquin Nin-Culmell to her husband Ian Hugo, an analysis by Benjamin Franklin V of her reception connected with the jackets for A Spy in the House of Love, and fresh commentary on her reception in Japan.