Ladders to Fire, Children of the Albatross, The Four-Chambered Heart, A Spy in the House of Love, Seduction of the Minotaur. Haunting and hypnotic, these five novels by Anaïs Nin began in 1946 to appear in quiet succession. Though published separately over the next fifteen years, the five were conceived as a continuous experience—a continuous novel like Proust’s, real and flowing as a river.

The full impact of Anaïs Nin’s genius is only to be found through reading the novels in context and in succession. They form a rich, luminous tapestry whose overall theme Nin has called “woman at war with herself.” Characters, symbols appear and reappear: now one, now another unfolding, gradually revealing, changing, struggling, growing, and Nin had forged an evocative language all her own for the telling.

“The diary taught me that there were no neat ends to novels, no neat denouement, no neat synthesis,” she explains. “So I began an endless novel, a novel in which the climaxes consisted of discoveries in awareness, each step in awareness becoming a stage in the growth like the layers in trees.”

Cities of the Interior fulfills a long–time desire on the part of readers, publisher, and Anaïs Nin herself to reunite the five novels in a single volume.

With its breathtaking vistas and countless acres of unmarked wilderness, Alaska has long attracted those who are looking for a bit of adventure in their vacations—from visitors who want to climb rugged peaks to those content to push a stroller down a paved trail. Filled with maps and photos, Outside in the Interior is the perfect guidebook for outdoor enthusiasts of all levels of ability. It presents detailed information about trails throughout Interior Alaska, including round-trip distance, estimated hiking duration and difficulty, elevation, seasonal variations, and tips on what wildlife and other sights hikers are likely to observe along the way. Features on trail etiquette, safety, and the environment round out the volume, making this fully up-to-date new edition of Outside in the Interior an invaluable companion to any trip to America’s largest state.

From a cartographer who wrote to a writer who mapped, the literary significance of surveying is revealed in this study of human relationships to the landscape. From the very beginning, American literature was closely intertwined with surveying. In Surveying the Interior, Rick Van Noy explores the ways that four American literary cartographers—Henry David Thoreau, Clarence King, John Wesley Powell, and Wallace Stegner—concerned themselves with what it means to map or survey a place and what it means to write about it. In the process, he helps define the ways by which space enters the human psyche as definable place, as well as the ways by which physical landscape is transmuted into a sense of place as an intimate, personal manifestation of both physical and existential realities.