A Horse at Night: On Writing

"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.