House of Incest

House of Incest
Author: Anaïs Nin
Publisher: Sky Blue Press
Total Pages: 24
Release: 2010-07-14
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1452405840

The House of Incest, Anais Nin's famous prose poem, was first published in Paris in 1936 and immediately drew attention from the era's prominent writers, including Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell. While written in English, it is considered a landmark work in the French surrealist tradition and one of the most unique books in 20th century literature.

Incest

Incest
Author: Anaïs Nin
Publisher: HMH
Total Pages: 443
Release: 1993-09-16
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0547540787

The trailblazing memoirist and author of Henry & June recounts her relationships with Henry Miller and others—including her own father. Anaïs Nin wrote in her uncensored diaries like they were a broad-minded confidante with whom she shared the liberating psychosexual dramas of her life. In this continuation of her notorious Henry & June, she recounts a particularly turbulent period between 1932 and 1934, and the men who dominated it: her protective husband, her therapist, and the poet Antonin Artaud. However, most consuming of all is novelist Henry Miller—a man whose genius, said Anaïs, was so demonic it could drive people insane. Here too, recounted in extraordinary detail, is the sexual affair she had with her father. At once loving, exciting, and vengeful, it was the ultimate social transgression for which Anaïs would eventually seek absolution from her analysts. “Before Lena Dunham there was Anaïs Nin. Like Dunham, she’s been accused of narcissism, sociopathy, and sexual perversion time and again. Yet even that comparison undercuts the strangeness and bravery of her work, for Nin was the first of her kind. And, like all truly unique talents, she was worshipped by some, hated by many, and misunderstood by most . . . A woman who’d spent decades on the bleeding edge of American intellectual life, a woman who had been a respected colleague of male writers who pushed the boundaries of acceptable sex writing. Like many great . . . experimentalists, she wrote for a world that did not yet exist, and so helped to bring it into being.” —The Guardian Includes an introduction by Rupert Pole

I Want To Show You More

I Want To Show You More
Author: Jamie Quatro
Publisher: Picador
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2019-02-26
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1760785180

Sharp-edged and fearless, mixing white-hot yearning with daring humour, Jamie Quatro’s debut short-story collection is a stunning and subversive portrait of modern infidelity, faith, and family. Set around Lookout Mountain on the border of Georgia and Tennessee, Quatro’s hypnotically revealing stories range from the traditional to the fabulist as they expose lives torn between spirituality and sexuality in the New American South. These fifteen linked tales confront readers with dark theological complexities, fractured marriages, and mercurial temptations. Throughout the collection, a mother in her late thirties relates the various stages of her affair while other characters lay bare their own notions of God, illicit sex, raising children, and running: a wife comes home with her husband to find her lover’s corpse in their bed; marathon runners on a Civil War battlefield must carry phallic statues and are punished if they choose to unload their burdens; a girl’s embarrassment over attending a pool party with her quadriplegic mother turns to fierce devotion under the pitying gaze of other guests; and a husband asks his wife to show him how she would make love to another man. Sultry, acute, startlingly intimate, and enticingly cool, I Want To Show You More is the thrilling debut of an exhilarating new voice in American fiction.

My Father's House

My Father's House
Author: Sylvia Fraser
Publisher: Virago Press
Total Pages: 254
Release: 1989
Genre: Adult child abuse victims
ISBN: 9780860681816

She was a beautiful blond child, a quintessential Canadian teenager: she loved Saturday film matinees, giggled at pyjama parties, ran for student president, led the cheerleading squad, went steady with the right boy and married him, her proud father at her side. But from the age of seven Sylvia Fraser shared her body with a 'twin' who lived a separate life from her. This other self was created to do the things Sylvia was too frightened, too ashamed, too repelled to do - the things her father made her do. As an adult, she had no recollection of a sexual relationship with her father, yet some connection always remained - pain, terror and guilt were never far from the surface. With tremendous power, candour and eloquence, Sylvia Fraser breaks through her amnesia to discover and embrace the self she left behind. MY FATHER'S HOUSE is at once a terrible account of a woman's coming of age and a lyric story of love and forgiveness.

House of Secrets

House of Secrets
Author: Lowell Cauffiel
Publisher: Kensington Publishing Corp.
Total Pages: 448
Release: 2014-04-01
Genre: True Crime
ISBN: 0786034165

The epic horrors of psychopathic mastermind Eddie Lee Sexton from the New York Times bestselling author who “knows how to dramatize true crime” (Elmore Leonard). For years, Eddie Lee Sexton ruled his large family like Charles Manson. The depraved patriarch dominated his ragged brood of twelve children mentally, physically, and sexually, and enforced every cruelty imaginable, from vicious beatings to raping his daughters and fathering their children. Finally, in 1992, Sexton’s eighteen-year-old daughter Machelle, seeking refuge in a women’s shelter, revealed the shocking, sordid details of her father’s abuse to authorities. As the law attempted to catch up to Eddie Lee Sexton, he moved his family to a mobile home in western Florida. Ultimately, Sexton’s efforts to escape prosecution led to two grisly murders in his own family. Yet Sexton’s sick genius almost helped him elude the justice he deserved. Lowell Cauffiel’s true-crime masterpiece vividly exposes the horrors of Eddie Lee Sexton’s psychosis and the shattered lives of those who survived. Includes sixteen pages of photos “An odyssey into American pathology . . . Deeply disturbing.” —Detroit Free Press “Incest, rape, murder, infanticide, torture, psychological abuse . . . House of Secrets is bedtime reading for devoted true crime fans!” —Booklist “A balanced and grimly engaging account of one of the weirdest domestic situations this side of the House of Usher.” —Publishers Weekly

House of Names

House of Names
Author: Colm Toibin
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2017-05-09
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 150114023X

* A Washington Post Notable Fiction Book of the Year * Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, The Guardian, The Boston Globe, St. Louis Dispatch From the thrilling imagination of bestselling, award-winning Colm Tóibín comes a retelling of the story of Clytemnestra and her children—“brilliant…gripping…high drama…made tangible and graphic in Tóibín’s lush prose” (Booklist, starred review). “I have been acquainted with the smell of death.” So begins Clytemnestra’s tale of her own life in ancient Mycenae, the legendary Greek city from which her husband King Agamemnon left when he set sail with his army for Troy. Clytemnestra rules Mycenae now, along with her new lover Aegisthus, and together they plot the bloody murder of Agamemnon on the day of his return after nine years at war. Judged, despised, cursed by gods, Clytemnestra reveals the tragic saga that led to these bloody actions: how her husband deceived her eldest daughter Iphigeneia with a promise of marriage to Achilles, only to sacrifice her; how she seduced and collaborated with the prisoner Aegisthus; how Agamemnon came back with a lover himself; and how Clytemnestra finally achieved her vengeance for his stunning betrayal—his quest for victory, greater than his love for his child. House of Names “is a disturbingly contemporary story of a powerful woman caught between the demands of her ambition and the constraints on her gender…Never before has Tóibín demonstrated such range,” (The Washington Post). He brings a modern sensibility and language to an ancient classic, and gives this extraordinary character new life, so that we not only believe Clytemnestra’s thirst for revenge, but applaud it. Told in four parts, this is a fiercely dramatic portrait of a murderess, who will herself be murdered by her own son, Orestes. It is Orestes’s story, too: his capture by the forces of his mother’s lover Aegisthus, his escape and his exile. And it is the story of the vengeful Electra, who watches over her mother and Aegisthus with cold anger and slow calculation, until, on the return of her brother, she has the fates of both of them in her hands.

Mirages

Mirages
Author: Anaïs Nin
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Total Pages: 481
Release: 2013-10-15
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0804040575

Mirages opens at the dawn of World War II, when Anaïs Nin fled Paris, where she lived for fifteen years with her husband, banker Hugh Guiler, and ends in 1947 when she meets the man who would be “the One,” the lover who would satisfy her insatiable hunger for connection. In the middle looms a period Nin describes as “hell,” during which she experiences a kind of erotic madness, a delirium that fuels her search for love. As a child suffering abandonment by her father, Anaïs wrote, “Close your eyes to the ugly things,” and, against a horrifying backdrop of war and death, Nin combats the world’s darkness with her own search for light. Mirages collects, for the first time, the story that was cut from all of Nin’s other published diaries, particularly volumes 3 and 4 of The Diary of Anaïs Nin, which cover the same time period. It is the long-awaited successor to the previous unexpurgated diaries Henry and June, Incest, Fire, and Nearer the Moon. Mirages answers the questions Nin readers have been asking for decades: What led to the demise of Nin’s love affair with Henry Miller? Just how troubled was her marriage to Hugh Guiler? What is the story behind Nin’s “children,” the effeminate young men she seemed to collect at will? Mirages is a deeply personal story of heartbreak, despair, desperation, carnage, and deep mourning, but it is also one of courage, persistence, evolution, and redemption that reaches beyond the personal to the universal.

The Incest Diary

The Incest Diary
Author: Anonymous
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 145
Release: 2018-11
Genre: Adult child abuse victims
ISBN: 1408890429

Throughout her childhood and adolescence, the anonymous author of The Incest Diary was raped by her father. Beneath a veneer of normal family life, she grew up in and around this all-encompassing secret. Her sexual relationship with her father lasted, off and on, into her twenties. It formed her world, and it formed her deepest fears and desires. Even after she broke away, even as she grew into an independent and adventurous young woman, she continued to seek out new versions of the violence, submission and secrecy she had struggled to leave behind. In this graphic and harrowing memoir, the author revisits her early traumas and their aftermath - not from a clinical distance, but from deep within - to explore the ways in which her father's abuse shaped her, and still does. As a matter of psychic survival, she became both a sexual object and a detached observer, a dutiful daughter and the protector of a dirty secret. And then, years later, she made herself write it down. With lyric concision, in vignettes of almost unbearable intensity, this writer tells a story that is shocking but that will ring true to many other survivors of abuse. It has never been faced so directly on the page.

Incest and the Literary Imagination

Incest and the Literary Imagination
Author: Elizabeth Barnes
Publisher:
Total Pages: 382
Release: 2002
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780813025407

"Its range--both chronological and methodological--as well as the consistently high quality of its essays makes this collection stand out. A timely and important collection . . . on literary representations of incest [that will] become the touchstone for further work in the field."--Teresa A. Goddu, Vanderbilt University "These original and provocative essays fill a significant gap in our literary histories of sex and gender."--Bruce Burgett, University of Washington, Bothell This wide-ranging collection tracks the contradictory roles of incest in Anglo-American literature, politics, and culture from the Middle Ages, a period Elizabeth Barnes states is considered unrivaled for its "unblinking acceptance of many varieties of incest," to the present. Barnes explicates the role of incest in Anglo-American literature and culture, and in doing so sheds new light on the familiar story of incest as a vice of barbarians and a privilege of the elite. This unprecedented critical treatment of the subject speaks comprehensively to the greater attention placed on the occurrence of incest in the last several decades even as it provides a critical grasp of the topic from complex theoretical and historically nuanced perspectives. The essays range across a variety of methodological approaches--including psychoanalytic, cultural-historical, biographical, and queer theoretical. In this seminal work in the field, Elizabeth Barnes clarifies the role of literature as a privileged site for the inquiry into incest. She links literature's ability to "tell trauma"--a theoretical issue of the book--to the personal, political, and cultural approaches to incest that the volume addresses. The result is a collection, unlike many of such broad scope, whose essays flow seamlessly and coherently from one focus to the next. Contents Part I. The Royal Privilege of Incest 1. "Worse Than Bogery": Incest Stories in Middle English Literature, by Elizabeth Archibald 2. Incest and Authority in Pericles, Prince of Tyre, by Susan Frye 3. Sexual and Social Mobility in The Duchess of Malfi, by Frank Whigham 4. Incest and Class: 'Tis Pity She's a Whore and the Borgias, by Lisa Hopkins Part II. The Fall of the Fathers 5. The Ambivalence of Nature's Law: Representations of Incest in Dryden and His English Contemporaries, by T.G.A. Nelson 6. Natural and National Unions: Incest and Sympathy in the Early Republic, by Elizabeth Barnes 7. Temperance in the Bed of a Child: Incest and Social Order in Nineteenth-Century America, by Karen Sanchez-Eppler Part III. The Silence of the Daughters 8. Incest in the Story of Tancredi: Christine de Pizan's Poetics of Euphemism, by Elizabeth Allen 9. "Don't Say Such Foolish Things, Dear": Speaking Incest in The Voyage Out, by Jen Shelton 10. "Father, Don't You See I'm Burning?": Identification and Remembering in H.D.'s World War II Writing, by Madelyn Detloff Part IV. Incest in the House of Culture 11. Telling Fact from Fiction: Dorothy Allison's Disciplinary Stories, by Gillian Harkins 12. "Hereisthehouse": Cultural Spaces of Incest in The Bluest Eye, by Minrose C. Gwin 13. Sexual Trauma/Queer Memory: Incest, Lesbianism, and Therapeutic Culture, by Ann Cvetkovich 14. The New Face of Incest?: Race, Class, and the Controversy over Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss, by Mako Yoshikawa Elizabeth L. Barnes is associate professor of English at the College of William and Mary.