Indelicacy

Author: Amina Cain

Stock information

General Fields

  • : 22.99 AUD
  • : 9781922268518
  • : Text Publishing Company
  • : The Text Publishing Company
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  • : 0.185
  • : October 2019
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  • : 22.99
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  • : books

Special Fields

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  • : Amina Cain
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  • : Paperback
  • : Mar-20
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  • : English
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  • : 176
  • : FA
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Barcode 9781922268518
9781922268518

Local Description

MATILDA BOOKSHOP REVIEW

This is a delicate and spare exploration of art and creativity, passion and friendship between women, and what it costs to authentically express our desires. When the cleaning woman at an art gallery marries into wealth, she realises her doorway into the world of art and literature is not made any easier by her new found privilege. I loved this razor-sharp meditation on women's relationship to artmaking, class, and sexuality. Molly
 

Description

A ghostly 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.   Amina Cain is the author of two collections of short fiction, Creatureand I Go to Some Hollow. Her essays and short stories have appeared in n+1, Paris Review Daily, BOMB, Full Stop, Viceand elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles and is a contributing editor at BOMB.'There are no stakes, no rising action, no arc. Just a wild kind of lostness that's as alluring as it is unsettling.' Los Angeles Times 'Indelicacyis 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