Creature

“Amina Cain is a beautiful writer. Like the girl in the rearview 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 & words make me feel, like clouds hanging with jets, & knowing love is pure.” —Thurston Moore

Amina Cain’s Creature brings together short fictions set in the space between action & reflection, edging at times toward the quiet & contemplative, at other times toward the grotesque or unsettling. Like the women in Jane Bowles’s work, Cain’s narrators seem always slightly displaced in the midst of their own experiences, carefully observing the effects of themselves on their surroundings & of their surroundings on themselves. Other literary precursors might include Raymond Carver & John Cage, with Carver’s lucid prose & instinct for the potency of small gestures & Cage’s ability to return the modern world to elementary principles. These stories offer not just a unique voice but a unique narrative space, a distinct & dramatic rendering of being-in-the-world.