15:3 Winter-Spring 1962

ANAÏS NIN

Sabina

After Irving Rosenthal and his cohort left the staff, Hyung Woong Pak and the remaining staff members directed the magazine toward a focus on European literature: they produced a special issue on “Existentialism and Literature” for Summer 1959 and a series of issues in 1962 devoted to “Modern European Literature.” They also continued to present new fiction and poetry, including new work by Stanley Elkin and Paul Herr.

“Sabina” by Anaïs Nin appeared in the Winter-Spring 1962 issue. Nin would not become widely-known in the United States until the publication of her diaries commenced in 1966. She had recently combined several earlier works in what she described as a roman fleuve: Cities of the Interior was published in 1959. Editor Hyung Woong Pak recently described how he compiled “Sabina”:

We revived Anaïs Nin in 1962 with the publication of her story, “Sabina.” Actually, I didn’t know Anaïs Nin was living in the Village in New York. Alan Swallow, whom I published in Chicago Review (1960), gave me her address. I wrote Nin and she promptly sent me a large box of manuscripts. Her letter to me was that I could publish whatever suitable I could find from her manuscripts. It took me a while to get through the box. The box contained her work in progress at various stages. Out of the fragments, I was able to piece together a coherent portion and edited it. I then named the work “Sabina” and published it in Chicago Review.

The story has subsequently appeared in the Anaïs Nin Reader.

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