I give Little Birds four stars in comparison to Delta of Venus' two, though as a stand alone, it would probably only get 2 or 3. There are almost no disgusting and despicable sex scenes in Little Birds, and for this, I am grateful. (As it turns out, I'm a bit prudish after all...)

Little Birds is set in various places around the world, but quite often set in New York and New Orleans. It feels more modern than Delta of Venus. It feels more aware, more present. And this, my second dip into a colle More...

This book, along with it's companion book (they run together in my mind and am talking about both here), Delta of Venus, are wonderfully evocotive erotic stories. They are never the wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am stuff of porn magazines. Sometimes magical, sometimes freaky, with a European sensibility, these stories are softly spellbinding. I can't help but get caught up in them whenever I pick up these books. Elena, Pierre, Leila, the Basque and Bijou, what a cool group of characters! And there are s More...

Ok first up I bought this knowing that it contained stories that are also in The Delta of Venus and Eros Unbound, so I guess out of 13 stories I've already read 6 most of which I love and adore and would read agian over and over. The remaining 7 left me feeling a little disappointed, the verve seems to have gone, the exquisite delicacy and graceful writing and words, vanished, the languidity replaced by a sense of urgency. Perhapes by the time she wrote these she was bored to tears of writing er More...

Anais Nin is in no way a contemporary of Henry Miller! Maybe it's my narrow view of things (and my first time at reading erotica) but it's really not that good. Her stories are short and bland and unstimulating. Even the language is simple. I don't aruge that she's a good writer (I believe she is) but the only thing I found remarkable about the book was the preface in which she describes how hard it is to focus solely on eroticism and how it changes your life. I may give one of her other books a More...

One restless and unproductive afternoon I sat thinking of writers, of books and of something new to read. I didn't just want something on my 'to-read' list that I finally pull out. No, I wanted something utterly fresh, different, something I would remember whether for good or for bad. This book became Little Birds...

I would never have picked a book like this and thought it to be something good, if I hadn't have learned about her as a person, so in that way, I picked up the book for the writer, a More...

This book would be a great read for someone too conservatively raised to appreciate visual pornography for its valuable lessons in learning how to be comfortable with yourself or your partner. It would be a valuable read for someone who did not know how to caress his or her partner to get them aroused for sex.

If someone's fifteen-year-old son asked their mom or dad what sex was all about, first it would be wise to tell them about reproduction, how to avoid it until ready, venereal diseases, and More...

This little book of short stories is by far some of the finest erotica ever written. Nin is a true master of love, lust, and the body’s betrayal of our innermost desires. Nin writes with a simple elegance. Never overdoing the imagery, we get just what we need to feel the work without a crass microscopic examination. Nin plunges deeply into the psyche of her characters, and we get more than an up-close and personal intimate glimpse of their inner turmoil as they struggle to break free of their se More...

This book was one of two small volumes of erotic short stories written by Anais Nin, the other being Delta of Venus. Nin was a member of the literary circle in pre-war Paris and later New York that included Henry Miller. On the basis of this and extensive diaries and fictionalised autobiography produced from them, she gained a reputation in the 1960s as a literary figure.

Nin's stories were among the first to be published when censorship laws were relaxed in the 1970s and this, plus the fact tha More...

Anais Nin is easily one of the highest tier of intelligent, smoothly clever and casually prolific erotica writers in modern literary history. the prologue to this collection of erotic short stories explains clearly how they came to be and why writers did so at the time. to even ponder a reality that she wrote most of this for pay and not for driven inner desire is impressive.
think on it like pulling off a term paper, that you have no real personal interest in, over a weekend. your 'teachers' ra More...

This book was interesting. I was surprised to come across it while browsing at the library. Who knew? I had read Delta of Venus years ago and remember thinking that it was interesting (and informative), but that the writing style felt a little stiff. I have found that I still feel that way, but that I had missed the insight into our natures that really are what make the work enduring.

This is a collection of erotic short stories. The best way I can describe the effect of this book on the reader comes from Nin’s own words in the preface. She comments that most writers of erotica do not set out to write such material; they are driven to it by the need for money. “Most of the erotica was written on empty stomachs.” She goes on to note that hunger will stimulate the imagination. But she also cautions that if “you get too hungry, too continuously, you become a bum…” I found some a More...

El esplendor de la juventud, la idea atrevida, los sitios prohibidos y el deseo de lo prejuzgado. Con una serie de cuentos más frescos que en "Delta de Venus" Anaïs Nin nos vuelve a sugestionar y despertar la imaginación al ubicarnos en sitios privilegiados, escribiendo para los hombres como lo siente una mujer. Deliciosos relatos de imágenes eróticas y sensuales, que van desde el fogoso y por todos anhelado encuentro con una mujer desconocida en la playa, hasta repetidas ocasiones en el estudio More...

Here is how the book is billed: "Evocative, compelling, superbly erotic, Little Birds is a powerful journey into the mysterious world of sex and sensuality."

Here is what Alice Walker, one of my favorite female authors, has said: "[It is] so distinct an advance in the depiction of female sensuality that I felt, on reading it, enormous gratitude."

Here's what I thought: "Eh."

I am trying to find out whether Nin originally wrote in French and the work was translated to English...which might explain More...

My boyfriend had pulled this off the bookshelf and I thought he was going to read it. Turns out he was just looking for something to put under the laptop to shield his lap from the heat. (apropos) No matter. I took it as a sign and decided to read it. I loved 'Henry and June' so thought I might really like these stories. As far as erotica goes, it was pretty tame by today's standards. It's funny to see how many times a person can write the words "fever", "heat" and "hardness" in one story. The w More...

Little Birds is a collection of erotic short stories written in the 1940s. While they cover a variety of topics, including lesbianism, pedophilia, and group sex, they still feel extremely tame due to their time frame. Because they were written for money ("a dollar a page"),the characters can be almost caricaturish. This lens a sense of humor and almost surrealness to the stories, while still maintaining the heightened sensuality of their erotic desires or actions. I enjoyed how Nin doesn't focus More...

Hace mucho tiempo lo leí, más bien guiada por los Trópicos de Miller. La erótica de Nin es divertida y entretenida, aunque en un plan naive (no hay que esperar mucha sofisticación estilística o técnica en sus cuentos). Una los lee como ve una soap opera, por su poder para inducir un estado de placentera ociosidad u olvido pasajero. ¿Si Nin es como un D.H. Lawrence en una mente femenina? Es una pregunta interesante, pero me atrevo a decir que entre los dos no hay punto de comparación, al menos no More...

I was pursuing the e-book shelves on my library's web site and found this book. I read a few reviews and was encouraged by the comparisons to Henry Miller. I have been trying to broaden my reading and thought I would give it a try. Over all, I enjoyed the stories, and the only real negative I can find is the rather abrupt ending of many of the stories. Of all the stories, "The Model" was my favorite.

I found Little Birds to be an intriguing set of stories and I am glad that I took the time to rea More...

I think I only read this because I thought I should, as if it's required reading for people who like sex.

this is how I learned about sex. Thanks mom and dad for owning it! Also, I stole it from you.

An interesting collection of very short erotic stories. I don't read very much erotica, so I can't compare this to anything, really, but it did certainly remind me of Memoirs of a Beatnik in many ways. Some of the writing is lovely, some is awful. The characters are mostly caricatures, but overall I liked it alright and was able to read the whole thing in just two hours. I suspect that if the stories individually and the book as a whole weren't so short, I might have grown bored. I'd really like More...

These stories are as varied as they are delicious, exotic as the are relatable. Anais's writing seems to create a window through which her readers and see sex and desire and consuming passion as the most basic, natural human experiences. There is no veil of obscenity, no judgement, no sin. Anais has a way of finding the absolute black and white that separates eroticism and vulgarity, and places her stories right in the grey. There is an element of psychology in her writing that, among other thi More...

Again, minor work by a major talent, her work-for-hire erotic fiction--it's a nice intro to the work of Nin, get your feet wet (so to speak.) Then move on to the major fiction--the unique early short works, Under a Glass Bell and Winter of Artifice, and the novels that comprise Cities of the Interior: Spy in the House of Love, Ladders to Fire, Children of the Albatross... then onto the Diaries, starting in 1931, go forward, then back to the early diaries Linotte. Then subscribe to Cafe in Space, More...

More of Nin's short stories, this time thirteen tales on the erotic. As usual the writing is varied, and with many of the stories they are simply too short to properly engage or excite. At the time Nin's writing must have been shocking and revolutionary, but in many parts it now simply reads in quite a dated fashion, her depictions of women are often cliché, yet in many cases this is missing the point - her characters are all clichés, most often based around her own life and experiences. These s More...

I picked this up out of a pile of books going into a give away bin, having no idea what it was about or clue who Anais Nin was as an author. Whoa... after reading the first three stories I knew this was something... else, so I researched Nin. Amazing... got back to it with different eyes. Intense. I really enjoyed her themes, social commentary, concepts of human freedom and open exploration of sexuality, but some of the darker stories and the depth of hurt and longing made it painful as well, he More...

I read this collection of essays without knowing anything about Anaïs Nin and what she’s trying to do. It made me search for more in her stories, which may not have had more than artists ‘taking’ women, sexual dysfunction, and overwhelming sensations, i.e. erotica. Is she Marquis de Sade (sadist, sexual insanity)? Edgar Allan Poe (symbolism x100)? I’ll reach out on limbs and say this, for me, was transgressive fiction…like the works of Chuck Palahniuk, Irvine Welsch, Bret Easton Ellis, uninhibit More...

This is my first time to read erotica, but because I pretty much have a good idea what to expect, I wasn't at all shocked, surprised, nor repulsed. As I figured, the only way to appreciate erotic literature such as this is to keep an open mind.

I would like to report that I did exactly that, in the first stories. Towards the end, however, I could not also help but become cynical and/or sarcastic. After all, how much sex can you read about and let your mind absorb before your head actually, truly More...

I always love reading Anais Nin. She has a certain beauty and exotic tapestry to her work that flushes out these amazing scenarios and characters so full of vim that it makes me want to whisk away to 1930s Paris and be an artist's model, or flirt with dangerous girls in Mexican nightclubs whilst dressed in ostentatious garb.

Even her use of language in the erotic elements of her stories work because she has such a knack for description that it invokes the images so melodramatically into existenc More...

I found this book long after discovering "Delta of Venus" as a boy on someone's book shelf. I read "Little Birds" as an adult and I believe it should be taken in tandem with the former rather than separately.


What I can say is that thanks to encountering Anias Nin as a boy, I grew up viewing sexuality and sexual attraction as something that takes place mostly in the mind and it is that tension that she describes, between desire and fear/exhileration, and the surrender that her characters often g More...

In the introduction to Little Birds, Anais Nin states in plain terms how difficult it was for writers to make a living, and then goes on to explain that many writers wrote erotic fiction as a means of supporting themselves in those difficult times (as we are all aware, sex sells). I don't know if this admission tainted my reading of the stories, but they all seemed pretty bland and under-developed. Though the stories all involved sex or arousal, I didn't necessarily find them all erotic, or even More...