"Indelicacy isn't merely a book, it's a world; a world I wanted to live in, forever . . . Arch, yet warm; aspiring and impervious; confiding and enigmatic; reposing and intrepid; Cain has conjured a protagonist who purged my mind and filled my heart." ―Claire-Louise Bennett, author of Pond 
A haunted feminist fable, Amina Cain’s Indelicacy is the story of a woman navigating between gender and class roles to empower herself and fulfill her dreams.
In "a strangely ageless world somewhere between Emily Dickinson and David Lynch" (Blake Butler), a cleaning woman at a museum of art nurtures aspirations to do more than simply dust the paintings around her. She dreams of having the liberty to explore them in writing, and so must find a way to win herself the time and security to use her mind. She escapes her lot by marrying a rich man, but having gained a husband, a house, high society, and a maid, she finds that her new life of privilege is no less constrained. Not only has she taken up different forms of time-consuming labor―social and erotic―but she is now, however passively, forcing other women to clean up after her. Perhaps another and more drastic solution is necessary?
Reminiscent of a lost Victorian classic in miniature, yet taking equal inspiration from such modern authors as Jean Rhys, Octavia Butler, Clarice Lispector, and Jean Genet, Amina Cain's Indelicacy is at once a ghost story without a ghost, a fable without a moral, and a down-to-earth investigation of the barriers faced by women in both life and literature. It is a novel about seeing, class, desire, anxiety, pleasure, friendship, and the battle to find one’s true calling.

Indelicacy: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Cain, Amina

United States

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

Fiction. "Amina Cain is a beautiful writer. Like the girl in the rear view mirror in your backseat, quiet, looking out the window half smiling, then not, then glancing at you, curious to her. That is how her thoughts and words make me feel, like clouds hanging with jets, and knowing love is pure."—Thurston Moore "To be among Amina Cain's creatures is to stand in the presence of what is mysterious, expansive, and alive. Whether these distinctly female characters are falling in and out of uncanny intimacies, speaking from the hidden realms of the unconscious, seeking self-knowledge, or becoming visible in all their candor and strangeness, they move through a universe shaped by the gravitational pull of elusive yet resilient forces-the yin-dark energies of instinct and feeling that animate creative life. It's here that the intuitive reach of fiction meets the reader's own quest for understanding, through the subtle beauty of living the truth of one's experiences in the most attentive and unadorned way possible."—Pamela Lu

Creature (Dorothy, a Publishing Project, 8)

Dramas & Plays

Dorothy, a publishing project

About the Author\nAmina Cain is the author of the short fiction collections Creature and I Go to Some Hollow. Her essays and short stories have appeared in n+1, The Paris Review Daily,BOMB, Full Stop, Vice, the Believer Logger, and other places. She lives in Los Angeles and is a contributing editor at BOMB.\nFINALIST FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION'S FIRST NOVEL PRIZE\n"Cain’s small but mighty novel reads like a ghost story and packs the punch of a feminist classic." ―The New York Times Book Review\nA haunted feminist fable, Amina Cain’s Indelicacy is the story of a woman navigating between gender and class roles to empower herself and fulfill her dreams.\nIn "a strangely ageless world somewhere between Emily Dickinson and David Lynch" (Blake Butler), a cleaning woman at a museum of art nurtures aspirations to do more than simply dust the paintings around her. She dreams of having the liberty to explore them in writing, and so must find a way to win herself the time and security to use her mind. She escapes her lot by marrying a rich man, but having gained a husband, a house, high society, and a maid, she finds that her new life of privilege is no less constrained. Not only has she taken up different forms of time-consuming labor―social and erotic―but she is now, however passively, forcing other women to clean up after her. Perhaps another and more drastic solution is necessary?\nReminiscent of a lost Victorian classic in miniature, yet taking equal inspiration from such modern authors as Jean Rhys, Octavia Butler, Clarice Lispector, and Jean Genet, Amina Cain's Indelicacy is at once a ghost story without a ghost, a fable without a moral, and a down-to-earth investigation of the barriers faced by women in both life and literature. It is a novel about seeing, class, desire, anxiety, pleasure, friendship, and the battle to find one’s true calling.

Indelicacy

Picador Paper

In "a strangely ageless world somewhere between Emily Dickinson and David Lynch" (Blake Butler), a cleaning woman at a museum of art nurtures aspirations to do more than simply dust the paintings around her. She dreams of having the liberty to explore them in writing, and so must find a way to win herself the time and security to use her mind. She escapes her lot by marrying a rich man, but having gained a husband, a house, high society, and a maid, she finds that her new life of privilege is no less constrained. Not only has she taken up different forms of time-consuming labor-social and erotic-but she is now, however passively, forcing other women to clean up after her. Perhaps another and more drastic solution is necessary? Reminiscent of a lost Victorian classic in miniature, yet taking equal inspiration from such modern authors as Jean Rhys, Octavia Butler, Clarice Lispector, and Jean Genet, Amina Cain's Indelicacy is at once a ghost story without a ghost, a fable without a moral, and a down-to-earth investigation of the barriers faced by women in both life and literature. It is a novel about seeing, class, desire, anxiety, pleasure, friendship, and the battle to find one's true calling.

Literary

Tantor Audio

'I wanted to write about paintings, but I wasn't seen as someone who could say something interesting about art. Before meeting my husband, I had mopped the floors of those galleries, over and over. I had scrubbed the walls until my palms were rough and dry.'\nIn a ghostly, undefined era and place, a cleaning woman at a museum of art aspires to do more than simply dust the paintings around her. She escapes her lot by marrying a rich man, but having gained a husband, a house, and a maid, she finds that her new life of privilege is no less constrained. Not only has she taken up different forms of time-consuming labour but she is now, however passively, forcing other women to clean up after her. Perhaps another and more drastic solution is necessary?\nIndelicacy is an exquisite gem of a novel about seeing, class, desire, anxiety, pleasure, friendship, and the battle to find one s true calling.

Daunt Books

Fiction. In her debut collection of fifteen short stories, Amina Cain makes ordinary worlds strange and spare and beautiful. A woman carves invisible images onto ice, a pair of black wings appears in front of a house, and a restless teacher sits in a gallery of miniature rooms. As Miranda Mellis describes, "The revelatory pleasure and hope [in these stories] emanate from an artistry driven by ethical desire." "I highly recommend reading I Go To Some Hollow", says Bhanu Kapil, "because of what it teaches you about love, and the relationship between love and writing." I GO TO SOME HOLLOW is published as part of the TrenchArt: Tracer Series, with an Introduction by Bhanu Kapil and collaborative visual art by Ken Erhlich and Susan Simpson.

I Go to Some Hollow

Contemporary

Les Figues Press

“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\n“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.

A Horse at Night: On Writing

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Indelicadeza

Genre Fiction

Plot Ediciones, S.L.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Cain, Amina. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Cain, Amina

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Cain, Amina. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Indelicacy: A Novel

Creature (Dorothy, a Publishing Project, 8)

Indelicacy

Indelicacy: A Novel

Indelicacy

I Go to Some Hollow

A Horse at Night: On Writing

Indelicadeza