A Horse at Night

Essayistic inquiries come together into a sustained meditation on writers and their works, on the spaces of reading and writing fiction, and how these spaces take shape inside a life. In A Horse at Night, Amina Cain contemplates how to be honest, open and free, as a person and a writer, even (and perhaps especially) during a time of great change. She moves elegantly through a personal canon of authors - including Marguerite Duras, Elena Ferrante and Annie Ernaux - and topics as timely and various as female friendships, neighbourhood coyotes, landscape painting and the politics of excess, to profound and joyous effect. An individual reckoning with the contemporary moment and a quietly brilliant contribution to the lineage of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own or William H. Gass's On Being Blue, A Horse at Night is a virtuosic argument for - and beautiful demonstration of - the essential unity of writing and life. 'An exceptional book, a work of depth and elegance, with Amina Cain's bright intelligence threaded into its very seams. An exquisite creation.' Doireann Ni Ghriofa

Amina Memory Cain is the author of the novel Indelicacy, a New York Times Editors' Choice and staff pick at the Paris Review, finalist for the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize and longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. She is also the author of two collections of short stories. Her writing has appeared in Granta, the Paris Review Daily, and other places. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband.