Anaïs Nin, better known for her diaries but better sold for her pornography ("Delta of Venus"), has left us another peep show in "Little Birds," a volume of 13 short stories that threaten to stir the erotic imagination.

In the preface to "Delta of Venus" she says that it was hunger that drove her and a number of starving writer and poet friends to collaborate on these droll tales….

Her mysterious client had specifications: his orders were to "leave out the poetry and descriptions of anything but sex. Concentrate on sex." Nin felt that it was this exclusion of poetry from his life that forced him to resort to literary aphrodisiacs….

The lubricous and sexually curious might, in time of need, find this volume of nostalgic sexware just the right thing to prod a lazy fantasy life; things are named, yet never become explicit enough to be judged obscene…. One imagines the wealthy gentleman who commissioned this charming curio to be a circumspect and discriminating connoisseur with a penchant for all sorts of erotica, one who would be shocked by today's insistence on the clinical close-up or the use of four-letter words in place of punctuation.

As I read "Little Birds" a common refrain seemed to unite the stories, that of impotence at the very moment it was inopportune to be so. Also rampant was the sadistic withholding of sexual favors, and the preference by males for females who were either virgins, statues or corpses (or acted as if they were)….

Are these perhaps attempts by Nin to help the male reader identify with her amorous heroes? The lapses of tumescence are only momentary, though, and every story in "Little Birds" becomes a sexual success story. Why not? The value of the stories lies in putting to rest feelings of fear and guilt, burying them at a great distance from the source. Once sex (in "Little Birds") is consummated, the object of desire and fantasy is allowed to disappear, never to bear witness against the main orgasmic character (or reader). This is ideal, is it not? Pleasure without repercussions? And this is what the reader will get from "Little Birds."