Overview

Amina Cain's extraordinary fiction has been said to take place in a strangely ageless world somewhere between Emily Dickinson and David Lynch (Blake Butler), and this, her debut novel, is no exception. Indelicacy introduces us to a cleaning woman at an art museum who 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--she is now, however passively, forcing other women to clean up after her. Perhaps another, 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.

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9781665200721

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Reviews

Cain's concentrated, subtle, and intriguing portrait of an evolving artist resolutely rejecting gender and class roles...explores the risks and rewards of a call to create and self-liberate. -- Booklist (starred review) It reminded me of A Room of One's Own with a few wicked twists...[it] is not escapist reading, but it is fuel, pushing you to do the thing you love. -- New York Times This beautiful volume presents a compelling and unexpected take on women's fulfillment in love, work, and the world. Feminist and meticulous, Indelicacy is fresh, graceful, and gratifyingly daring. -- Ms. magazine

Author Information

Lauren Ezzo, an Earphones Award-winning narrator, is a commercial voice talent and Chicago-based actor and graduate of Hope College. She has acted in Peppermint Creek Theatre Company's world premiere of Or You Could Kiss Me. Her narrations have placed her on several Best of the Year lists, including AudioFile's Best Audiobooks of the Year list. In 2018, she was part of a full cast of narrators nominated for the prestigious Audie Award for Best Original Work. Amina Cain is the author of two collections of short fiction, Creature and I Go to Some Hollow. Her essays and short stories have appeared in n+1, the Paris Review Daily, BOMB, Full Stop, Vice, the Believer Logger, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles and is a contributing editor at BOMB.

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