Author(s): Amina Cain

Books, Writing and Language

"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.