What I like most about this book is a marvelous story behind it. It all started with Henry Miller, who was offered to write erotica, one dollar a page, by an unknown rich collector. The torturing part was that there should be as much sex as possible and as less poetry and philosophy as possible. Despite that, pretty soon all of Miller's broke artist-friends, including Anais Nin, were writing erotica. "This started an epidemic of erotic "journals," she writes in her journal, "Everyone was writing up their sexual experiences. Invented, overheard, researched from Krafft-Ebing and medical books. We had comical conversations. We told a story and the rest of us had to decide whether it was true or false. Or plausible.... All of us needed money, so we pooled our stories.... Gonzalo needed cash for the dentist, Helba needed a mirror for her dancing, and Henry money for his trip.... The telephone bill was unpaid. The net of economic difficulties was closing in on me. Everyone around me irresponsible, unconscious of the shipwreck. I did thrirty pages of erotica."
And her short stories are exactly like this - bordering on the limits of imagination; drops of fragrant perfume brought to a consentrated, numbing and almost unbearable exaggeration.