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Read a conversation between Amina and Laura Adamczyk at BOMB. Check out a conversation between Amina and Patrick Cottrell at Granta.
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“Amina Cain is a phenomenal writer. I adore her work, and sensibility.” Claire-Louise Bennett
“Cain writes beautiful precise sentences about what it means to wander through this luminous world.” Jenny Offill
“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
“Much like Cain’s debut novel Indelicacy (2020), A Horse at Night illustrates, with gentle accuracy, a life both inextricable from and transformed by writing and reading.” Nathalie Dunn, Los Angeles Review of Books
“I’ve been finding myself returning again and again to Amina Cain’s recent A Horse at Night, finding wisdom, beauty and recognition in her distilled observations on writing and making art.” Sophie Makinstosh, The Guardian
“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
“Part essay, part memoir, part literary criticism, and wholly a love letter to books and their transformative impact, A Horse at Night is simply stunning.” Mark Haber, Southwest Review
“Cain is not interested in certainty or conclusion. Rather, she is interested in the process, writing and reading as a lifelong action, the “grazing at writing,” venturing further into its pastures.” Hannah Bonner, Cleveland Review of Books
“In a moment of shared, heightened aloneness, Cain recovers the shared city of readers—a space for connection and renewal.” Garin Cycholl, Rain Taxi
“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
“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
“A masterful work about writing and reading, that feels like a manifesto and conversation all in one. Intimate, insightful and brilliant.” Sinéad Gleeson
“Avoiding all the tropes of those popular how-to books, what Cain has managed to produce is something much more indispensable. As with Berger or Woolf before, A Horse at Night illustrates with painstaking accuracy how it is possible to live within art, as if it might play a role in everything we do or say or love, as if the self might be made up of more than the distinctly visible. More than learning the machinery of plot, what any young writer needs to know is that such a life—with its imperfections and impossible queries—is possible.” Connor Harrison, Chicago Review of Books
“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
“Cain creates an urgent yet serene and refreshingly vulnerable meditation on the unity between life and art.” Liska Jacobs, Esquire
“A delightful meditation on reading and writing from a writer whose talent is seemingly limitless . . . Cain’s prose remains deceptively simple, but contains a latent beauty worthy of stopping even the most avid of readers in their tracks. This is a marvelous new addition to the realm of genre-resistant literary nonfiction.” Meghana Kandlur, Open Books (Chicago)
“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
“Cain offers a spare, graceful meditation on her rich, idiosyncratic reading and her practice of writing.” Kirkus Reviews
“To read Amina Cain is to enter tide pools of the mind.” Alissa Hattman, The Rumpus
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