Publishers Weekly
08/08/2022
Novelist Cain (Indelicacy) offers a rewarding collection of literary musings, combining personal reflections, criticism, and thoughts on the act of writing. 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”). 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. 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. Agent: Melissa Flashman, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Oct.)
From the Publisher
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
“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
“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)
“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
Kirkus Reviews
2022-07-20
How one writer reads.
Making her nonfiction debut, novelist Cain offers a spare, graceful meditation on her rich, idiosyncratic reading and her practice of writing. Tove Jansson’s The True Deceiver, Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter, Adam Gopnik’s Winter, and Annie Ernaux’s The Possession are among dozens of works (a bibliography is appended) that have inspired Cain’s thoughts about identity and authenticity, language and landscape, solitude and friendship—not least, the trust and vulnerability that complicate human-animal relationships, such as hers with her three cats. It was Marguerite Duras’ The Ravishing of Lol Stein that inspired her to write fiction when she found herself unable to stop thinking about Duras’ central character. Regarding her craft, “of all the forms language can take, the sentence is the one I’m most drawn to,” she writes. “I want to leave a chain of images that remain in the reader’s mind. I want to write what heightened experience feels like.” Cain is excited by the idea that she might “haunt” her sentences so that “the reader might be taken over subtly.” Her sensibilities, though, have changed as she has gotten older: “I have more fears than I had when I was younger; I am more rigid; and there has been a loss too of the freedom I once felt, when the world seemed entirely open, and utterly beautiful.” How, she wonders, will these changes—and changes in the world, too, including climate change and the pandemic—affect the novel she is working on now? “I want to be able to write about loneliness, humiliation, and shame, things I never would have written about before, that would have embarrassed me,” she notes. “For a long time I didn’t want to write ‘emotionally’…there has been something valuable for me in exploring the emotionless.” Cain ties her development as a writer to her engagement in zazen meditation; in stillness, she was able to listen for her voice.
An intimate recounting of a literary life.
