Indelicacy
Amina Cain
(Author)
21,000+ Reviews
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Description
FINALIST FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION'S FIRST NOVEL PRIZE
"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 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.Product Details
Price
$16.00
$14.88
Publisher
Picador USA
Publish Date
February 09, 2021
Pages
176
Dimensions
5.1 X 7.6 X 0.5 inches | 0.2 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9781250785718
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Become an affiliateAbout the Author
Amina Cain is the author of a novel, Indelicacy, and the short story collections Creature and I Go To Some Hollow. Her essays and short stories have appeared in The Paris Review Daily, BOMB, Granta, n+1, the Believer Logger, and other places. She lives in Los Angeles.
Reviews
Indelicacy is a short book but it feels brilliantly expansive to read. Cain writes beautiful precise sentences about what it means to wander through this luminous world. --Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation and Weather
Eyebrow raising, tantalizing, and unforgettable . . . Indelicacy makes you think about creativity, friendship, and the nature of time . . . It transported me to a different part of my life. --Elisabeth Egan, The New York Times Book Review
Cain upends fairy tale endings in . . . this incisive tale . . .[Indelicacy] disquiets with its potent, swift human dramas. --Publishers Weekly A sort of ghostly arthouse Cinderella . . . Cain's prose vibrates with fear and wonder. This is a novel I read three times slowly, basking in each phrase. --Nate McNamara, Literary Hub Deeply rooted in the literary tradition, [Indelicacy] inconspicuously references works like Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea and Octavia Butler's Kindred and explores themes like class and gender. With its short, spare sentences, Cain's writing seems simple on the surface--but it is deeply observant of the human condition, female friendships, and art. A short, elegant tale about female desire and societal expectations. --Kirkus Reviews To read Amina Cain is to enter tide pools of the mind. On its surface, her fiction is quiet, lovely, contained, but sit with any passage and that which seems still uncoils and comes alive. The reach of her fiction is an invitation to peer deep into our inner worlds. --Alissa Hattman, The Rumpus Cain . . . works with insight and finely crafted writing, making Indelicacy perfect for fans of Virginia Woolf and Michael Cunningham. --Cindy Pauldine, Shelf Awareness (starred) I developed a kind of synesthesia when considering Cain's writing . . . Indelicacy is graceful and incisive. --Anne K. Yoder, The Millions Though Indelicacy does not announce itself as autofiction, it shares with autofiction what I find to be the most fundamental aspects of the genre: the act of writing becomes inextricable from the story being told. --Natalie Bakopoulos, Fiction Writers Review What would a Vermeer look like painted by its subject? Measured, intense, precise, explosive, sensual, violent, mesmerising. --Joanna Walsh, author of Break.up In Indelicacy we meet a woman who spends time studying landscape paintings and then walking inside the landscapes where she lives. She looks at a landscape then moves inside another, and as we read it begins to seem that the landscapes in paintings and in fiction are eerily the same. In a deeply pleasing way, reading this novel is a bit like standing in a painting, a masterful study of light and dark, inside and out, freedom and desire. Amina Cain is one of my favorite writers. I loved reading this book. --Danielle Dutton, author of Margaret the First To read Amina Cain's Indelicacy is akin to donning magnifying spectacles that distill a woman's past into modern reality, these lucid and uncanny lenses remaining on the eye far beyond her pages. --Josephine Foster, musical artist With simplicity and wisdom, Amina Cain's Indelicacy strips away the clutter of the modern novel, leaving only her narrator's concentrated attention and yearning. As a tribute to the history of its own form, Indelicacy manages to expand our ideas of both the classic and the contemporary. --Tim Kinsella, music-maker and author of Sunshine on an Open Tomb Acutely observed, Indelicacy is an exquisite jewel box of a novel with the passion and vitality found only in such rare and necessary works as The Hour of the Star and The Days of Abandonment. Through this timeless examination of solitude, art, and friendship, Amina Cain announces herself as one of the most intriguing writers of our time. --Patrick Cottrell, author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace Amina Cain's diligence, patience, and clarity of vision are unparalleled. This is a writer profoundly aware of the impact and import of silence. Her sentences echo long after they've landed on the page. Keep your eyes peeled for Indelicacy. --Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, author of Call Me Zebra Amina Cain redefines strangeness and freedom in this beautiful and unusual novel that resembles fairy tales and ghost stories but feels intensely contemporary. --Alejandro Zambra, author of Multiple Choice Indelicacy is a novel like the tolling of a great bell. It will move your heart. Amina Cain's writing is the rarest kind: it creates not only new scenes and characters, but new feelings. --Sofia Samatar, author of Winged Histories I was spellbound by Amina Cain's Indelicacy, partly because it is a lucid novel about human relationships, the soul, art, and change; partly because it is an intelligent yet raw tale about what ruptures are required to grow room for oneself; partly because of its witty juxtaposition of good and bad; but mostly because it is deeply original, like nothing I've ever read before. --Gunnhild Øyehaug, author of Wait, Blink