Collages explores a world of fantasy and dreams through an eccentric young painter. A radical work in its time (1964), Anais Nin dispensed with normal structural convention and allowed her characters to wander freely in space and time in an attempt to describe life with the disconnected clarity of a dream in which hip and freakish lives intersect or merge. Making a rapid escape from her sick father in Vienna, Renate begins her sensation-seeking travel odyssey accompanied by a gay Norwegian man who allows her to open one of his chinese boxes and read a chapter of his past each time she finds his absence unbearable. They move from Mexico to California where Renate, when she is not painting portraits, works as a hostess at a beach nightclub with a 'way-out' clientelle. She befriends Nina, who wants to wash the floor with beer, uses her dress as a tent and does witch-laughter for radio, and further adventures ensue. Perhaps reflecting a developing contemporary awareness of abstract art, Collages is a series of impressions rather than a coherent whole, a shifting notebook indelibly inscribed with Nin's humour, invention and unrivalled gift for sensuous description.