Creature [Paperback]

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 Cain takes a lot of risks in her book by redefining plot and creating so many narrators who are unknowable and generally unfamiliar. But the risks pay off in sheer beauty, and, in CREATURE, she has created a beautiful monster indeed. ???The Collagist Cain captures a particular kind of attempt at happiness: trying to be easy on oneself; praying at a Zen monastery; focusing on small pleasures like orchids and neatly folded towels. Perhaps that's why, in both form and content, so much here is microscopic, with a delicate sadness infusing mundane activities like bathing, spilling olive oil, and touching a wall...Cain's tone???unknowing, exhibiting the most awed reverence toward the smallest details of life and thought???remains wonderfully effective

throughout. ???Publishers

Weekly [Cain's characters] are like people who have

narrowly escaped disaster. Shell-shocked and clothed l£6