A Horse at Night: On Writing
Amina Cain“I adore her work, & sensibility,” writes Claire-Louise Bennett of Amina Cain; & 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 & the surprising, finds a profound new expression in her first nonfiction book, a sustained meditation on writers & their work.
Driven by primary questions of authenticity & freedom in the shadow of ecological & social collapse, Cain moves associatively through a personal canon of authors— including Marguerite Duras, Elena Ferrante, Renee Gladman, & Virginia Woolf— & topics as timely & various as female friendships, zazen meditation, neighborhood coyotes, landscape painting, book titles, & the politics of excess. A Horse at Night: On Writing is an intimate reckoning with the contemporary moment, & 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—& beautiful demonstrations of—the essential unity of writing & life.
Amina Cain is the author of the novel Indelicacy & two collections of short fiction, Creature & I Go to Some Hollow. Her essays & short stories have appeared in n+1, The Paris Review Daily, BOMB, Full Stop, Vice, the Believer Logger, & other places. She lives in Los Angeles.