https://aminacain.com Amina Memory Cain Mon, 03 Oct 2022 16:36:47 +0000 https://aminacain.com en https://aminacain.com/About-1 Mon, 03 Oct 2022 03:55:26 +0000 Amina Memory Cain https://aminacain.com/About-1 &nbsp;<img width="3882" height="5823" width_o="3882" height_o="5823" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/022d21c50bad9d272a418bd020dcf14d4a214e6dbc36b77268e715f3115c7fa3/251025_AminaC_v1-260111_SDeyoe_4588-1.jpg" data-mid="243088725" border="0" data-scale="74" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/022d21c50bad9d272a418bd020dcf14d4a214e6dbc36b77268e715f3115c7fa3/251025_AminaC_v1-260111_SDeyoe_4588-1.jpg" /> Photo Credit: Sean Deyoe Amina Cain is the author of the novel Indelicacy, a New York Times Editors’ Choice and finalist for the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, published in 2020, and two collections of short stories, Creature and I Go To Some Hollow. A Horse at Night: On Writing, came out in 2022. Her second novel, My New Face, will be published in the US by Farrar, Straus &amp; Giroux in 2027, and with Daunt Books in the UK, and Text Publishing in Australia. Her books have been translated into Spanish, Turkish, Bulgarian, and Italian, and two new translations are forthcoming in Norwegian. Stories and essays have appeared in Granta, The Paris Review Daily, BOMB, LA Times, Tate Etc.&nbsp;and other places. Amina has also co-curated literary events, such as When Does It or You Begin?, a month long festival of writing, performance, and video at Links Hall in Chicago; Both Sides and The Center, a summer festival of readings and performances enacting various levels of proximity, intimacy, and distance at the MAK Center/Schindler House in West Hollywood; and the Errata Salon, a talk/lecture series at Betalevel in LA’s Chinatown. She lives in Los Angeles.&nbsp; Represented by Melissa Flashman at Janklow &amp; Nesbit. contact: aminacain@gmail.com https://aminacain.com/Writing-1 Mon, 03 Oct 2022 03:55:27 +0000 Amina Memory Cain https://aminacain.com/Writing-1 <img width="375" height="500" width_o="375" height_o="500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4d78aa096c8939978fac02fdbff20ce255200e82c6f7c2802e9ff241eda281cf/MAK-Amina.jpg" data-mid="154666029" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/375/i/4d78aa096c8939978fac02fdbff20ce255200e82c6f7c2802e9ff241eda281cf/MAK-Amina.jpg" /> Photo Credit: Elizabeth Hall Believer LoggerBOMBEveryday GeniusFinancial Times Five DialsFull StopGrantaLos Angeles Review of BooksLos Angeles Timesn+1Tate Etc. The New York TimesThe Paris Review DailyThis Long Century https://aminacain.com/News-1 Mon, 03 Oct 2022 03:55:28 +0000 Amina Memory Cain https://aminacain.com/News-1 &nbsp; <img width="4032" height="3024" width_o="4032" height_o="3024" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c70ac89066d368c9961df882aa83c5de71f949d9e7314f663925239b3df8c34a/IMG_4196.JPG" data-mid="159135773" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c70ac89066d368c9961df882aa83c5de71f949d9e7314f663925239b3df8c34a/IMG_4196.JPG" /> Indelicacy will soon be out in Italian (translated by Ilaria Oddenino) with Atlantide Edizioni.My new novel, My New Face, will be published by Farrar, Straus &amp; Giroux in 2027, along with Daunt Books in the UK, and Text Publishing in Australia. I’ll be in conversation (online) on December 3rd with writer Lisa Robertson and curator Gemma Blackshaw on the occasion of artist Cathie Pilkington’s HOUSEKEEPER at the Freud Museum London. Words Come to Me / Me vienen palabras, a short story translated by Daniela Bentancur in Eterna Cadencia.For the Open City Documentary Festival in London, I wrote about Armand Yervant Tufenkian’s wonderful film In the Manner of Smoke. I talked with Montse Andrée Carty at the Musings of the Artist podcast.An excerpt of Indelicacy was translated into Norwegian by Julia Wiedlocha for Vinduet magazine.I got to talk to Shawn the Book Maniac and recommend books by Suzanne Scanlon, Marie NDiaye, and Brian Dillon.I was in conversation with Giada Scodellaro on Marie NDiaye’s Self Portrait in Green for the Chicago Review of Books. I wrote a short piece on two films for the film series The Machine That Kills Bad People at the ICA. Indelicacy was featured on BBC Radio 4’s A Good Read.&nbsp; My playlist for A Horse at Night at largehearted boy. I was in conversation with Mina Kim on KQED Forum about ambivalence around motherhood. https://aminacain.com/A-Horse-at-Night Mon, 03 Oct 2022 15:21:41 +0000 Amina Memory Cain https://aminacain.com/A-Horse-at-Night <img width="640" height="392" width_o="640" height_o="392" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/36a2a1101e4c07c4b1fcdc84398128846c89a70c8027777d83bd016f6893b927/Cain-Horse-cover-french-flaps-copy.jpeg" data-mid="154745786" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/640/i/36a2a1101e4c07c4b1fcdc84398128846c89a70c8027777d83bd016f6893b927/Cain-Horse-cover-french-flaps-copy.jpeg" /> <img width="416" height="640" width_o="416" height_o="640" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3e8bb259abbd9ad0a69e78d1fbd9718064ad41d79e095aaf865f7e1964bb78b1/Daunt_A-Horse-at-Night_web.jpeg" data-mid="154719218" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/416/i/3e8bb259abbd9ad0a69e78d1fbd9718064ad41d79e095aaf865f7e1964bb78b1/Daunt_A-Horse-at-Night_web.jpeg" /> <img width="1184" height="1788" width_o="1184" height_o="1788" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/84dcf2f2c073d6337c4ca32234cf5dc440cc530a30b1010c986626a3eb270576/un-caballo-en-la-noche.png" data-mid="210042977" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/84dcf2f2c073d6337c4ca32234cf5dc440cc530a30b1010c986626a3eb270576/un-caballo-en-la-noche.png" /> A Horse at Night, 2022 from Dorothy, a publishing project (cover art: The Travelling Companions by Augustus Leopold Egg, 1862) in the US and w/ Daunt Books (cover art &amp; design by Tom Etherington) in the UK. An audiobook is available through Tantor Media. A Spanish translation by writer/translator Jazmina Barrera was published by&nbsp;Fiordo Editorial in Argentina in May 2024. A new translation by Julia Wiedlocha into Norwegian is forthcoming from Slow Fire Press.&nbsp; “Without planning it, I wrote a diary of sorts. Lightly. A diary of fiction. Or is that not what this is?” 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. “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“The cadences of Amina Cain’s writing have entered my brain like the sound of the sea. She gently sifts through a thought or a feeling and then, just as gently, discards it to move onto another. Sometimes, she returns to the same thought and feeling before again moving on. Her language is utterly compelling. I have written down the list of books that she cites in A Horse at Night. I want to read all of them.” Celia Paul “A masterful work about writing and reading, that feels like a manifesto and conversation all in one. Intimate, insightful and brilliant.” Sinéad Gleeson “Amina Cain has written a book that’s self-soluble, that thinks about its own dissolution as an artifact. Lol Stein takes her place beneath the rye, for example, and we know she’s there, an architecture of postures that works differently to the idea of shelter. Cain works precisely in this kind of space, between bodies and voids. Here, a reader can become a writer, too.” Bhanu Kapil “Amina Cain lays down the keys to her writing kingdom very quietly … I loved it.” Roger Robinson “Amina Cain is an elegant writer, and A Horse at Night is an elegant book. Idiosyncratic yet tight, weird yet unpretentious, highbrow yet immediate – I read this book in one sitting, then immediately began again.” Susan Finlay&nbsp; “Nimble and deft, Amina Cain is a seamstress of thought, stitching exquisite creations of text as if from cloth. A Horse at Night is an exceptional book, a work of depth and elegance, with her bright intelligence threaded into its very seams.” Doireann Ní Ghríofa “It was a joy to spend time in the company of the author’s elegant, wise voice. Many a sentence was underlined. It felt like some bizarre kind of manual.” Sara Baume&nbsp;‘Tender and intimate . . . a book that is as much about reading as about writing. For Cain, books are characters, friends, provocateurs, and reading a mental landscape through which she moves with a meandering, associative intent.’ Marina Benjamin, New Statesman“Cain’s influences and interests range from writers like Tove Jansson, Marguerite Duras, and Marie NDiaye, to artists like Albrecht Dürer and Hilma af Klint. Connecting them to various broader topics such as authenticity, individuality, and female friendship, Cain creates an urgent yet serene and refreshingly vulnerable meditation on the unity between life and art.” Liska Jacobs, EsquireReviews:“In A Horse at Night: On Writing, a shifting, elliptical essay on the writing life, Cain admits the crushing heaviness of composition, and the airy fantasies that attend it. She “grazes” at her writing—a metaphor she shares with Roland Barthes, on his reading—and she dreams (via Italo Calvino) of an impossible lightness. A Horse at Night is in part about this hope, but more ambitiously it’s an allusive and engaging account of the raptures you’d miss if complete creative ease were really possible.” Brian Dillon, 4Columns “Cain leads us carefully to an understanding: personality is separate from the self—it is contextual, emerging from relationships to one’s surroundings and companions. And through this understanding, we are able to glean A Horse at Night’s own authentic genre: not so much a diary as a tender, vulnerable self-portrait.” India Ennenga, The Believer“A Horse at Night is a transmutation of fiction and nonfiction, a form of unfurling, soft and grainy at the edges. Moving through this text feels like resting your eyes on shifting shapes on a walk in the dusk.” Sophie Brown, Astra “To read her prose feels something like drinking fresh water in a generously lit room—the kind of light you might find in a film, perhaps, or a kitchen in spring. When applied to the subjects that matter most in her life, this leads to sentences of the most clear-eyed vulnerability, not unlike the work of Annie Ernaux.” Connor Harrison, Chicago Review of Books “In a sense, Cain has kept intact the child’s imagination, so active, so fluid and tendrillar, that it never sees the partitions adults throw up between various realms and modes of existence.” Jay Ponteri, Essay Daily“There is a haunting quality to Cain’s description of what reading does to us. We can never truly let go of what we have read, much less what we have written.” Claire Thomson, Lunate“A Horse at Night opens out to the indeterminacy of genre like light through a barn: square on and aslant.” Hannah Bonner, Cleveland Review of Books“Making her nonfiction debut, novelist Cain offers a spare, graceful meditation on her rich, idiosyncratic reading and her practice of writing.” Kirkus Reviews “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.” Publishers Weekly Kiran Dass reviewed A Horse at Night on Nine to Noon at Radio New Zealand.&nbsp; Interviews: With Patrick Cottrell at Granta. With Mark Haber at the Southwest Review. With Laura Adamczyk at Bomb. With Maddie Crum at The Creative Independent. With Natalie Dunn at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Reading the Room with The Bar and the Bookcase. https://aminacain.com/Indelicacy Mon, 03 Oct 2022 16:34:58 +0000 Amina Memory Cain https://aminacain.com/Indelicacy <img width="667" height="1000" width_o="667" height_o="1000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9d23f1ec1f7bdb42f3a8e195f906dd3d372fab4ed353576109e8c07dee079b6c/9780374148379.jpg" data-mid="154737019" border="0" data-scale="52" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/667/i/9d23f1ec1f7bdb42f3a8e195f906dd3d372fab4ed353576109e8c07dee079b6c/9780374148379.jpg" /> <img width="1524" height="2339" width_o="1524" height_o="2339" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6915da0f7f6114868ae59fe4964ad5186cd4c2067c7b72df0d5378d10025d7ae/9781911547587-1.jpg" data-mid="154737157" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6915da0f7f6114868ae59fe4964ad5186cd4c2067c7b72df0d5378d10025d7ae/9781911547587-1.jpg" /> <img width="736" height="1142" width_o="736" height_o="1142" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/77eec116975a0aa42938ad22331d4c0cd8947dcfe88f963dfc6eb9c8f1a1321d/3-1-2.jpeg" data-mid="231764057" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/736/i/77eec116975a0aa42938ad22331d4c0cd8947dcfe88f963dfc6eb9c8f1a1321d/3-1-2.jpeg" /> <img width="960" height="1300" width_o="960" height_o="1300" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/538c4bc808c52dd13b7b353c56fceab8b0d5fac0ea0aef377b36198768bed7b2/084-indelicacy-960x1300.jpg" data-mid="246545373" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/960/i/538c4bc808c52dd13b7b353c56fceab8b0d5fac0ea0aef377b36198768bed7b2/084-indelicacy-960x1300.jpg" /> <img width="1684" height="2828" width_o="1684" height_o="2828" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/76eff3c6d7a810c908a26488391d1c6a29c51803428f739bede115211fb5e64a/9788486702953.jpg" data-mid="154743933" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/76eff3c6d7a810c908a26488391d1c6a29c51803428f739bede115211fb5e64a/9788486702953.jpg" /> <img width="1539" height="2362" width_o="1539" height_o="2362" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6234974685fa1681b9adca72a58bdcac8e60aed7e1f419755e712d6458406809/Indelicacy_Bulgarian-cover.jpg" data-mid="154744187" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6234974685fa1681b9adca72a58bdcac8e60aed7e1f419755e712d6458406809/Indelicacy_Bulgarian-cover.jpg" /> Indelicacy, 2020 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux (cover art by June Park). And w/ Daunt Books in the UK, Strange Light/Penguin Random House in Canada, Text Publishing in Australia, Plot Ediciones in Spain (translated by Inés Clavero), Kryg Publishing in Bulgaria (translated by Tsvetelina Lakova), Can Yayınları in Turkey (translated by Lale Akalin), Atlantide Edizioni in Italy (translated by Ilaria Oddenino), and as an audiobook with Tantor Media. A new translation by Julia Wiedlocha is forthcoming in Norwegian with Meteor Forlag. In “a strangely ageless world somewhere between Emily Dickinson and David Lynch” (Blake Butler), a cleaning woman at a museum of art nurtures aspirations to do more than simply dust the paintings around her. She dreams of having the liberty to explore them in writing, and so must find a way to win herself the time and security to use her mind. She escapes her lot by marrying a rich man, but having gained a husband, a house, high society, and a maid, she finds that her new life of privilege is no less constrained. Not only has she taken up different forms of time-consuming labor—social and erotic—but she is now, however passively, forcing other women to clean up after her. Perhaps another and more drastic solution is necessary? Reminiscent of a lost Victorian classic in miniature, yet taking equal inspiration from such modern authors as Jean Rhys, Octavia Butler, Clarice Lispector, and Jean Genet, Amina Cain’s Indelicacy is at once a ghost story without a ghost, a fable without a moral, and a down-to-earth investigation of the barriers faced by women in both life and literature. It is a novel about seeing, class, desire, anxiety, pleasure, friendship, and the battle to find one’s true calling. “What would a Vermeer look like painted by its subject? Measured, intense, precise, explosive, sensual, violent, mesmerising.” Joanna Walsh “Amina Cain is a phenomenal writer. I adore her work, and sensibility. Indelicacy isn’t merely a book, it’s a world; a world I wanted to live in, forever. Its near-and-far atmosphere is partly due to Cain’s unfazed handling of discrepant essences and qualities. Arch, yet warm; aspiring and impervious; confiding and enigmatic; reposing and intrepid; Cain has conjured a protagonist who purged my mind and filled my heart.” Claire-Louise Bennett “Indelicacy is a novel like the tolling of a great bell. It will move your heart. Amina Cain’s writing is the rarest kind: it creates not only new scenes and characters, but new feelings.” Sofia Samatar “In Indelicacy we meet a woman who spends time studying landscape paintings and then walking inside the landscapes where she lives. She looks at a landscape then moves inside another, and as we read it begins to seem that the landscapes in paintings and in fiction are eerily the same. In a deeply pleasing way, reading this novel is a bit like standing in a painting, a masterful study of light and dark, inside and out, freedom and desire. Amina Cain is one of my favorite writers. I loved reading this book.” Danielle Dutton “To read Amina Cain’s Indelicacy is akin to donning magnifying spectacles that distill a woman’s past into modern reality, these lucid and uncanny lenses remaining on the eye far beyond her pages.” Josephine Foster “Amina Cain redefines strangeness and freedom in this beautiful and unusual novel that resembles fairy tales and ghost stories but feels intensely contemporary.” Alejandro Zambra “Acutely observed, Indelicacy is an exquisite jewel box of a novel with the passion and vitality found only in rare and necessary works such as The Hour of the Star and The Days of Abandonment. Through this timeless examination of solitude, art, and friendship Amina Cain announces herself as one of the most intriguing contemporary writers of our time.” Patrick Cottrell “I read [Indelicacy] slowly, in a kind of reverie, wanting to savour every page. It is so exquisite and precise that I felt I wanted to read it constantly, to live inside it . . . A completely absorbing, luminous account of a woman inhabiting her life and creativity.” Megan Hunter “With simplicity and wisdom, Amina Cain’s Indelicacy strips away the clutter of the modern novel, leaving only her narrator’s concentrated attention and yearning. As a tribute to the history of its own form, Indelicacy manages to expand our ideas of both the classic and the contemporary.” Tim Kinsella “I was spellbound by Amina Cain’s Indelicacy, partly because it is a lucid novel about human relationships, the soul, art, and change; partly because it is an intelligent yet raw tale about what ruptures are required to grow room for oneself; partly because of its witty juxtaposition of good and bad; but mostly because it is deeply original, like nothing I’ve ever read before.” Gunnhild Øyehaug “Amina Cain’s diligence, patience, and clarity of vision are unparalleled. This is a writer profoundly aware of the impact and import of silence. Her sentences echo long after they’ve landed on the page. Keep your eyes peeled for Indelicacy.” Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi “Cain’s small but mighty novel reads like a ghost story and packs the punch of a feminist classic.” Editors’ Choice, The New York Times “Reading a book like Indelicacy might inspire a trip to the museum--but seeing art through Vitória’s eyes might be just as satisfying.” Maya Chung, The Atlantic “Indelicacy takes the happy-ever-after myth and turns it on its head, as the narrator Vitória, a former cleaner who marries a rich man and loses sight of herself, dances along the fault lines of gender, class and privilege. Cain writes with elegance on art and friendship, creating a fictional world that feels more like a painting than a book. I inhaled this strange and shimmering novel in a single sitting.” Ana Kinsella, AnOther Magazine “This sparse, elliptical novel finds new complexities in the familiar conflict between creative independence and the lures of traditional domesticity . . . stripped of all inessential details, the narrative has the simplicity of a parable—one whose images lodge themselves uneasily in the mind.” Briefly Noted, The New Yorker “A slip of a novel, Indelicacy can easily be read in one sitting. Set in a nameless city at an indefinite point in history, the feminist plot calls to mind various Victorian classics – its narrator starts out as a cleaning lady in a gallery before marrying “well” in order to pursue her dream of writing – but Cain’s writing also feels brilliantly, eerily contemporary, and is peppered with references to works ranging from Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea to Jean Genet’s The Maids.” Vogue UK “Fairy tale isn’t quite the right term to describe Cain’s prose; there is a fable-esque quality, yes, in its refusal to name places or dates, and she touches on familiar archetypes—Cinderella, the woman in need of a room of her own, the well-meaning but useless husband—with the ease of spinning straw into gold. Ultimately, though, this novel is a celebration of writing, and women’s writing in particular.” Rhian Sasseen, The Paris Review Daily “Last and never least is Amina Cain’s soon-to-be-published Indelicacy. Its title is a swift, elegant repudiation. I develop a synesthesia when considering Cain’s writing. I imagine Cain like Virginia Woolf’s Lily Briscoe standing before a canvas, painting her book with lush but controlled strokes, the painting itself airy, allowing ample room to move within and breathe.” Anne Yoder, The Millions “Though set in an indeterminate past of horse-drawn carriages and hushed drawing rooms, Amina Cain’s slim, precisely wrought debut novel reads as a fresh consideration of what it means to be a female artist. The old private and public expectations are still there for the narrator—a museum cleaning woman who marries well—but they aren’t what drives the story; rather it is her unwavering desire to write and take in art and grand experiences. In its tight focus, the novel also acts as something of a character study: Vitória exhibits the cool confidence of someone who needs no convincing of her purpose.” The A.V. Club “A sort of ghostly arthouse Cinderella, Amina Cain’s Indelicacy features a cleaning woman who becomes a wealthy wife, opening her attention to anything she chooses. “I felt the earrings would make the rich people at the party kind to me,” the protagonist says, “and that if I kept them my whole life, they would guard me against becoming poor again, against becoming a future hag.” Cain’s prose vibrates with fear and wonder. This is a novel I read three times slowly, basking in each phrase.” Nate McNamara, Lit Hub “This beautiful volume presents a compelling and unexpected take on women’s fulfillment in love, work and the world. Feminist and meticulous, Indelicacy is fresh, graceful and gratifyingly daring.” Karla Strand, Ms.“I loved Cain’s precise and stylish account of the social structures that tear us apart, and intimacies that – like a shared meal – hold us together.” Rebecca May Johnson, The GuardianIndelicacy was featured on BBC Radio 4’s A Good Read. Reviews: “If the Little Match Girl hadn’t frozen to death on the next page, she might have grown up to be the narrator of Amina Cain’s weird, quiet debut novel, “Indelicacy.” To be clear, I mean weird in the best way — as in eyebrow raising, tantalizing and unforgettable. This is a book that holds you at an arm’s length, not the other way around.” Elisabeth Egan, The New York Times “The book could be set in the nineteenth century or in the twenty-second. It is as if it exists in a strange no-place, which is perhaps Cain’s way of indicating that the story she is about to tell is ageless, even outside of time.” Sarah Resnick, Bookforum “Cain’s bone-clean prose creates a sense of immersion in a story that feels both mythic and true.” Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, The Guardian “The voice is perfect – intrepid but assured, appreciative and curious, an outsider, in short, a writer.” Sarah Gilmartin, The Irish Times “Living within an unembellished aesthetic tableau, Vitória is a character of sensory excess, inclined to spend her time at dance classes, libraries, the ballet, or, most often, simply thinking.” Nathan NcNamara, Los Angeles Review of Books “Though Cain sets her book in an implied 18th century, the total effect calls to mind the spaceless and sumptuous red plains of La Dame à la licorne, a series of medieval tapestries at Paris’s Cluny Museum.” Abby Walthausen, The Believer “Indelicacy, though, is a thing of real delicacy, with a fine, distilled quality to the writing, every word precisely chosen, precisely placed. At first it seems almost too sparse, each chapter just a few pages, with Vitória as enigmatic and elusive as her surroundings. We’re in an unnamed country in an unnamed point in history. But there’s a slyness to Cain’s writing that cuts through, and makes the tale increasingly engrossing. By the end, you walk in step with her heroine as she finds her own path towards freedom.” Holly Williams, The Observer/Guardian “Cain’s concentrated, subtle, and intriguing portrait of an evolving artist resolutely rejecting gender and class roles, with its subtle nods to Jean Rhys, Clarice Lispector, and Octavia Butler, explores the risks and rewards of a call to create and self-liberate.” Donna Seaman, Booklist starred review The most famous first-person story starts with a chapter titled, “I am born”. Here Cain concentrates on a woman trying, artistically and intellectually, to be born. Mark Thomas, The Canberra Times. “To read Amina Cain is to enter tide pools of the mind. On its surface, her fiction is quiet, lovely, contained, but sit with any passage and that which seems still uncoils and comes alive.” Alissa Hattman, The Rumpus “Books don’t have to be sagas to make an impression. Indelicacy’s undemanding prose style can likewise easily be a speed read. Perhaps it was always Cain’s intention to draw in busy readers quickly and easily, then suspend us, helpless and happy, in the extraordinary world she has created, unmoored in time or place.” Isabel Berwick, The Financial Times “Τhe connotations of ‘becoming’ here are multivalent—her husband means it as unsuitable, unseemly, unattractive. Indelicate. The novel, though, is about an uninterrupted emergence and shaping of the self. Yet Indelicacy is not only introverted. The novel turns outward while also, reflexively, remaining its subject.” Natalie Bakopoulos, Fiction Writers Review “While the book features vulgarities . . . its language and fragmented structure are gauzy and fine . . . The real magic of Cain’s slim novel lies in its restraint and precision . . . with its soft atmosphere and appreciation of the unspoken,&nbsp;the book evokes the filmmaking of Sofia Coppola, Joanna Hogg or Claire Denis.” Alina Cohen, The Observer “Cain . . . works with insight and finely crafted writing, making Indelicacy perfect for fans of Virginia Woolf and Michael Cunningham.” Cindy Pauldine, Shelf Awareness starred review “With its short, spare sentences, Cain’s writing seems simple on the surface—but it is deeply observant of the human condition, female friendships, and art. A short, elegant tale about female desire and societal expectations.” Kirkus Reviews “Vitória’s deadpan voice and Cain’s finespun descriptions of quotidian disappointment energize this incisive tale. This novel disquiets with its potent, swift human dramas.” Publishers Weekly “It’s appropriate that Amina Cain initially situates Vitória, the protagonist of her haltingly beautiful new collection of prosodies, as a cleaning lady in a museum. Her novel, laid out in sections that rarely move beyond a few pages, maintains a fractious semblance of narrative movement throughout.” Michael Workman, New City “It’s remarkable to witness how, after cutting away each unnecessary word, there is room – even in a novel of this size – to cover such an array of fascinating subjects, whilst adding something bracingly new to the discourse. Indelicacy has the makings of a modern classic, and is destined to be a book that women, in particular, hold close to their hearts.” Chloe Walker, Culture Fly “Old-world markers abound—horses and candlelight, embroidery and feathered hats—but the atmosphere is that of a parable, as if Vitória is writing herself into existence outside historical time, an effect enhanced by the snippets of other books that weave in and out of the text.” Lidija Haas, Harper’s “Readers will debate whether Vitória’s final act towards her husband constitutes an act of liberation or one of gross cynicism, but it is this rupture that earns this delicately wrought Künstlerroman its title.” Tayt Harlin, Times Literary Supplement Interviews:&nbsp;With Jaleh Brazell at Tank Magazine. With Jess Payn at The Arts Desk. With Naomi Skwarna at Hazlitt. With Anne Yoder at The Millions. With Patrick Cottrell at FSG’s Work in Progress. With Sofia Samatar at Music &amp; Literature. With Tobias Carroll at Vol. 1 Brooklyn. With Type Books. With Martin Riker at The Paris Review Daily. With Kate Durbin at LARB. With Kyle Williams at Full Stop. A conversation with Kate Zambreno for BOMB’s Room with a View series. Elisabeth Egan talked about Indelicacy on the NYT Book Review Podcast. Caren Beilin &amp; I talked about our books for Full Stop. I talked to Brad Listi at OTHERPPL. A conversation with Adam Novy at Skylight Books. https://aminacain.com/Creature Mon, 03 Oct 2022 16:36:21 +0000 Amina Memory Cain https://aminacain.com/Creature <img width="512" height="789" width_o="512" height_o="789" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/cfcbc7ab1a126aa2f1d4e4d5611dce6119dd2a5da81d7baeddc60199e3704e6c/236900142.png" data-mid="238671950" border="0" data-scale="66" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/512/i/cfcbc7ab1a126aa2f1d4e4d5611dce6119dd2a5da81d7baeddc60199e3704e6c/236900142.png" /> <img width="960" height="589" width_o="960" height_o="589" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/727037e3cf79e819f1e0e25e41a1678b21e2255f964731104f875dab56d9844f/945202_637849979562292_606449361_n.jpg" data-mid="154740916" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/960/i/727037e3cf79e819f1e0e25e41a1678b21e2255f964731104f875dab56d9844f/945202_637849979562292_606449361_n.jpg" /> Creature, fall 2013 from Dorothy, a publishing project (cover art by Catherine Lemblé). A Spanish translation by Daniela Bentancur came out in May 2025 with&nbsp;Fiordo Editorial in Argentina. &nbsp; Amina Cain’s&nbsp;Creature brings together short fictions set in the space between action and reflection, edging at times toward the quiet and contemplative, at other times toward the grotesque or unsettling. Like the women in Jane Bowles’s work, Cain’s narrators seem always slightly displaced in the midst of their own experiences, carefully observing the effects of themselves on their surroundings and of their surroundings on themselves. Other literary precursors might include Raymond Carver and John Cage, some unlikely concoction of the two, with Carver’s lucid prose and instinct for the potency of small gestures and Cage’s ability to return the modern world to elementary principles.&nbsp;These stories offer not just a unique voice but a unique narrative space, a distinct and dramatic rendering of being-in-the-world. “Amina Cain is a beautiful writer. Like the girl in the rear view mirror in your backseat, quiet, looking out the window half smiling, then not, then glancing at you, curious to her. That is how her thoughts and words make me feel, like clouds hanging with jets, and knowing love is pure.” Thurston Moore “To be among Amina Cain’s creatures is to stand in the presence of what is mysterious, expansive, and alive. Whether these distinctly female characters are falling in and out of uncanny intimacies, speaking from the hidden realms of the unconscious, seeking self-knowledge, or becoming visible in all their candor and strangeness, they move through a universe shaped by the gravitational pull of elusive yet resilient forces—the yin-dark energies of instinct and feeling that animate creative life. It’s here that the intuitive reach of fiction meets the reader’s own quest for understanding, through the subtle beauty of living the truth of one’s experiences in the most attentive and unadorned way possible.” Pamela LuReviews: “Let me describe where Creature rests in my body—deep within my thoracic spine, in the middle of my vertebrae alongside photo booth-sized images of unrequited knives. I am conscious of it as I watch my body read. Its language moves and settles. This process of watching—as opposed to thinking—may seem enigmatic. It is.” Claire Donato, HTML Giant “There’s not a sense of obsession with the self as much as there is a sense of the self unharbored, left living in a strangely ageless world somewhere between Emily Dickinson and David Lynch.” Blake Butler, VICE “As I read these stories, I found myself looking inside for the makings of a creature.” Teow Lim Goh, Full Stop “There are no stakes, no rising action, no arc. Just a wild kind of lostness that’s as alluring as it is unsettling.” Jim Ruland, The Los Angeles Times “Cain takes a lot of risks in her book by redefining plot and creating so many narrators who are unknowable and generally unfamiliar. But the risks pay off in sheer beauty, and in Creature, she has created a beautiful monster indeed.” Erin Lyndal Martin, The Collagist “Cain captures a particular kind of attempt at happiness: trying to be easy on oneself; praying at a Zen monastery; focusing on small pleasures like orchids and neatly folded towels. Perhaps that’s why, in both form and content, so much here is microscopic, with a delicate sadness infusing mundane activities like bathing, spilling olive oil, and touching a wall.” Publishers Weekly Interviews:A conversation between me &amp;&nbsp; Renee Gladman in BOMB. With Lauren Wallach at HTML Giant. With Richard Chiem at Fanzine. With Tobias Carroll at Vol. 1 Brooklyn. With Jonathan Messinger at Chicago Magazine. With Shane Jones at HTML Giant. With Elizabeth Hall at Delirious Hem. A reading/conversation of Creature at Ancient Dragon Zen Gate in Chicago. https://aminacain.com/I-Go-To-Some-Hollow Mon, 03 Oct 2022 16:36:47 +0000 Amina Memory Cain https://aminacain.com/I-Go-To-Some-Hollow <img width="1260" height="1332" width_o="1260" height_o="1332" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3f5ac703759a42972b2c9bdc5bdfeeac3826f6b2041f267a0ae7d2a895f685e5/hollow_cover.jpg" data-mid="154741518" border="0" data-scale="78" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3f5ac703759a42972b2c9bdc5bdfeeac3826f6b2041f267a0ae7d2a895f685e5/hollow_cover.jpg" /> I Go To Some Hollow, 2009 from Les Figues Press (cover art by Ken Ehrlich &amp; Susan Simpson), with an introduction by Bhanu Kapil (Out of Print). A Spanish translation is forthcoming from Paloma Ediciones.&nbsp; Question: “If you had to think of a motion you’ve made more than any other in your whole life, what would it be?” Response: “I don’t want to be a motion.” In her debut collection of fifteen short stories, Amina Cain makes ordinary worlds strange and spare and beautiful. A woman carves invisible images onto ice, a pair of black wings appears in front of a house, and a restless teacher sits in a gallery of miniature rooms. “Neurologically, touching and being touched, whether that’s brushing up against some kind of stalk-like, goldeny things in a tundra or being politely nudged into the back-seat of a Buick Le Sabre, is how a body locates itself in the softest kind of time. For bodies that have experienced a proprioceptive disturbance, touch thus becomes a way of re-building the nervous system. I’m fascinated by the way Cain does this–builds a nervous system–as an act of narrative. For example, when a person, in the deep part of her book, is at their most vulnerable, blurting out banal things to the person they are desperately, secretly in love with and then saying things in their head like “you stupid bloody idiot, why, why, why did you say that?” or somehow stumbling into a forested area above a busy road, on a day when everything else has totally gone to shit they are, by deep chance, met. Something comes towards them and doesn’t go away.” Bhanu Kapil Reviews: “I Go To Some Hollow floats and tilts, as balanced as a mobile; rather than narrative arcs we get laps, tides, and circuit, currents of clear observation and the occasional stunning insight.” Miranda Mellis, Rain Taxi Review of Books “In this debut collection, the dominant mood is [a] sense of wonder, shot through with nervousness.&nbsp; Amina Cain’s travelers view their surroundings with a curious emptiness, other times ecstasy, while adrift either abroad or in a distinctly American terrain: bodies of water, fields, or forests, the banality of a heated pool or the aisles of Home Depot.” Kate Zambreno, The Believer “There’s something calmly erotic about Cain’s writing, a treatment of sex as both a source of energy and a supremely unfascinating part of life.” Jonathan Messinger, Time Out Chicago “Don’t be surprised if you’re carrying this book around with you for a while.&nbsp; It has a way of wanting to accompany your own daily rituals.&nbsp; It has a way of expecting something from you.” Jacquelyn Davis, Bookslut “Cain’s debut demonstrates that when the clichéd expectations of traditional narrative are gently omitted, what’s left is a calming stillness, and startling language—a welcome relief from the ironic realism that characterizes so much young contemporary fiction.&nbsp; We need more writing like this.” A D Jameson, The Review of Contemporary Fiction https://aminacain.com/Books Mon, 03 Oct 2022 03:55:28 +0000 Amina Memory Cain https://aminacain.com/Books <img width="768" height="977" width_o="768" height_o="977" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b799b9f2b06b830eaa3461773848f1419a1db2381b34921925cba3253ac4bac8/Cain-Horse-front-cover-768x977.jpeg" data-mid="178233138" border="0" data-scale="75" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/768/i/b799b9f2b06b830eaa3461773848f1419a1db2381b34921925cba3253ac4bac8/Cain-Horse-front-cover-768x977.jpeg" /> <img width="667" height="1000" width_o="667" height_o="1000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9d23f1ec1f7bdb42f3a8e195f906dd3d372fab4ed353576109e8c07dee079b6c/9780374148379.jpg" data-mid="154664799" border="0" data-scale="75" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/667/i/9d23f1ec1f7bdb42f3a8e195f906dd3d372fab4ed353576109e8c07dee079b6c/9780374148379.jpg" /> <img width="768" height="977" width_o="768" height_o="977" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/72ce31fa1739fdddb844a954be49dcdc5a7d9bd70dd069f3db588e876a472615/creature-front-768x977.jpeg" data-mid="178232935" border="0" data-scale="75" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/768/i/72ce31fa1739fdddb844a954be49dcdc5a7d9bd70dd069f3db588e876a472615/creature-front-768x977.jpeg" /> <img width="768" height="812" width_o="768" height_o="812" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2a41630c30a39c16148140314a8b61d4e9476c740b97770db0710cd6f21dba04/hollow_cover.sm.jpg" data-mid="178233562" border="0" data-scale="75" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/768/i/2a41630c30a39c16148140314a8b61d4e9476c740b97770db0710cd6f21dba04/hollow_cover.sm.jpg" /> A Horse at Night, Dorothy, 2022 Indelicacy, Farrar, Straus &amp; Giroux, 2020 Creature, Dorothy, a publishing project, 2013 I Go To Some Hollow, Les Figues Press, 2009