By no means a craft book, one could still learn some things from A Horse at Night, namely, how a person might create a meaningful artistic life for themselves, forming and re-forming one’s aesthetics over time. In A Horse at Night, Cain meditates on art and literature-what she most desires from the work of others and her own-and also wanders into ancillary subjects like authenticity and solitude. “Mostly I want to go too far, but with a light touch,” she writes in A Horse at Night: On Writing (Dorothy), her second book with Danielle Dutton and Martin Riker’s vaunted independent press, and first work of nonfiction after two collections of short stories and the 2020 novel Indelicacy.
Cain approaches writing as a space of “pure possibility and pure freedom,” she says, while remaining a scrupulous self-editor, a sculptor of spare and often surprising sentences.
The gardens, not far from her home in the El Sereno neighborhood of Los Angeles and where she sometimes comes to write, are sprawling yet carefully maintained. (Oct.When Amina Cain tells me she thinks of writing as an open field, we’re sitting beneath the dense canopy of a tall, shady tree in San Marino’s Huntington Gardens. Agent: Melissa Flashman, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. Fans of her work-and of literary criticism more generally-won’t want to miss this. Readers will relish following Cain’s winding prose and carefully considered conclusions. 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. 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”). Novelist Cain ( Indelicacy) offers a rewarding collection of literary musings, combining personal reflections, criticism, and thoughts on the act of writing.
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