A horse at night : on writing

Title:

Author:

Summary:

In Amina Cain's first nonfiction book, a series of essayistic inquiries come together to form a sustained meditation on writers and their works, on the spaces of reading and writing fiction, and how these spaces take shape inside a life. Driven by primary questions of authenticity and freedom in the shadow of ecological and social collapse, Cain moves associatively through a personal canon of authors-including Marguerite Duras, Elena Ferrante, Renee Gladman, and Virginia Woolf-and topics as timely and various as female friendships, zazen meditation, neighborhood coyotes, landscape painting, book titles, and the politics of excess. A Horse at Night: On Writing is an intimate reckoning with the contemporary moment, and a quietly brilliant contribution to the lineage of Woolf's A Room of One's Own or William H. Gass's On Being Blue, books that are virtuosic arguments for-and beautiful demonstrations of-the essential unity of writing and life. -- Provided by publisher.

Edition:

First edition.

Physical Description:

133 pages ; 18 cm.

Genre:

Personal Subject:

Subject Term:

Novelists, American -- 21st century -- Biography.

Fiction -- Authorship

Art appreciation.

Publisher:

Dorothy, a publishing project,

Publication Date:

2022

ISBN:

9781948980135

Publication Information:

St. Louis, MO : Dorothy, a publishing project, [2022]

Call Number:

814.6 CAIN

Holds: Copies:

Available:*

Item Barcode	Collection	Call Number	Status	Item Holds
33607003639930	Adult Nonfiction	814.6 CAIN	Searching... Unknown	Searching... Unavailable

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

" A Horse at Night is like light from a candle in the evening: intimate, pleasurable, full of wonder. It asks us to consider fiction as life and life as fiction. Amina Cain is our generous, gentle guide through an exquisite library. A truly beautiful book." --Ayşegül Savaş

"I adore her work, and sensibility," writes Claire-Louise Bennett of Amina Cain; and Jenny Offill: "Cain writes beautiful precise sentences about what it means to wander through this luminous world." Cain's unique wandering sensibility, her attention to the small and the surprising, finds a profound new expression in her first nonfiction book, a sustained meditation on writers and their work. Driven by primary questions of authenticity and freedom in the shadow of ecological and social collapse, Cain moves associatively through a personal canon of authors-- including Marguerite Duras, Elena Ferrante, Renee Gladman, and Virginia Woolf-- and topics as timely and various as female friendships, zazen meditation, neighborhood coyotes, landscape painting, book titles, and the politics of excess. A Horse at Night: On Writing is an intimate reckoning with the contemporary moment, and a quietly brilliant contribution to the lineage of Woolf's A Room of One's Own or Gass's On Being Blue , books that are virtuosic arguments for--and beautiful demonstrations of--the essential unity of writing and life.

Author Notes

Amina Cain is the author of the novel Indelicacy and two collections of short fiction, Creature and I Go to Some Hollow . Her essays and short stories have appeared in n+1 , The Paris Review Daily , BOMB , Full Stop , Vice , the Believer Logger, and other places. She lives in Los Angeles.

Reviews (1)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Novelist Cain (Indelicacy) offers a rewarding collection of literary musings, combining personal reflections, criticism, and thoughts on the act of writing. Cain writes that "interiority is one of my favorite things to read in fiction--to abide in a narrator's mind if that narrator, that mind, compels me--and when you read a diary you have that, ten fold." Indeed, readers will enjoy abiding in Cain's mind as she moves gracefully from topics as disparate as solitude ("it's hard for us to see our own selves if we're not ever alone"), darkness ("maybe we get closer to something in the dark, or maybe it's the opposite"), pets ("We are both neurotic," she writes of her cat, Trout), and art ("How strange and sometimes demonic the faces of babies and children in early portrait paintings"). Books, films, and other artworks serve as signposts along the way--reflections on the work of Virginia Woolf, Italo Calvino, and Elena Ferrante appear frequently, plus she considers paintings by Paul Delvaux and Marie NDiaye. Readers will relish following Cain's winding prose and carefully considered conclusions. Fans of her work--and of literary criticism more generally--won't want to miss this. Agent: Melissa Flashman, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Oct.)