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I Go To Some Hollow
Fiction. In her debut collection of fifteen short stories, Amina Cain makes ordinary worlds strange and spare and beautiful. A woman carves invisible images onto ice, a pair of black wings appears in front of a house, and a restless teacher sits in a gallery of miniature rooms. As Miranda Mellis describes, "The revelatory pleasure and hope [in these stories] emanate from an artistry driven by ethical desire." "I highly recommend reading I Go To Some Hollow," says Bhanu Kapil, "because of what it teaches you about love, and the relationship between love and writing." I GO TO SOME HOLLOW is published as part of the TrenchArt: Tracer Series, with an Introduction by Bhanu Kapil and collaborative visual art by Ken Erhlich and Susan Simpson.
114 pages, Perfect Bound
First published May 1, 2009
About the author
Amina Cain
7 books304 followersAmina Memory Cain is the author of the novel Indelicacy, a New York Times Editors’ Choice and staff pick at the Paris Review, published in February 2020 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and two collections of short fiction, Creature, out with Dorothy, a publishing project, and I Go To Some Hollow, with Les Figues Press. Her writing has appeared in Granta, The Paris Review Daily, n+1, BOMB, Full Stop, the Believer Logger, and other places.
She has also co-curated literary events, such as When Does It or You Begin?, a month long festival of writing, performance, and video at Links Hall in Chicago, Both Sides and The Center, a summer festival of readings and performances enacting various levels of proximity, intimacy, and distance at the MAK Center/Schindler House in West Hollywood, and the Errata Salon, a talk/lecture series at Betalevel in Los Angeles’ Chinatown.
She lives in Los Angeles and is a literature contributing editor at BOMB. You can sometimes find her online on Twitter (@aminamemory) & Instagram (@amina_memory).
She has also co-curated literary events, such as When Does It or You Begin?, a month long festival of writing, performance, and video at Links Hall in Chicago, Both Sides and The Center, a summer festival of readings and performances enacting various levels of proximity, intimacy, and distance at the MAK Center/Schindler House in West Hollywood, and the Errata Salon, a talk/lecture series at Betalevel in Los Angeles’ Chinatown.
She lives in Los Angeles and is a literature contributing editor at BOMB. You can sometimes find her online on Twitter (@aminamemory) & Instagram (@amina_memory).
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
August 22, 2011
Amina Cain's stories are addictive in an emotional way--I don't want them to end, I want to keep reading them the way I want to keep watching a movie I like because I want to stay longer in the emotional world that these stories conjure up for me, a world of acute observations and perceptions, and such such sensitivity. Even though there's quite a bit of unrest in these tales, I look up from the pages stunned & gratified, a bit dazed from having been immersed in such a beautiful world. So different from the clumsy, crude world I usually have to deal with in the here & now. But Cain's world is real, it's the world created between people & creatures who feel and have relations with one another, who pay attention to the temperature differences between different raindrops and feel each other's longings as a kind of biology, a geography. She does it all in a deceptively plainspoken language, the kind of language that reminds me of what Truman Capote said of Jane Bowles' English, that it sounded like the kind of English that had been written in a foreign language at first and then clearly translated into English. A similar sense of uncanniness, alterity, and remove in Cain's English. And I do sense Jane Bowles, along with Marguerite Duras, along with Jeannette Winterson in places here. A woman acutely aware of her place or non-place in the world. A human who feels with the immediacy & intensity of an animal.
In fact, there’s a deep ecology at work in Cain’s stories, an ecology of desire & relation where emotions form the connective tissue that govern the movements of people towards and away from each other. The dominant emotion is love, an inexplicable kind of longing that may or may not be expressively sexual, but is always erotic. The stories revolve around points of contact which fit together a bit askew yet are part of a larger coherent system, like the microcosmic Warsaw apartment community in Krzysztof Kieslowski's Decalogue. Characters often approach one another with an arbitrary, almost childlike sentiment reminiscent of Jane Bowles. Humans and animals move in a continuum, we are all creatures in Cain’s world, which is arguably a feminine world. Once I was talking with a friend about the kinds of dialogue that characters have with one another in Marguerite Duras stories, the strange quality of literal disconnect between one character’s statement and the other character’s response, yet this literal disconnect actually feels like a deep emotional resonance. And this friend (who absolutely loves Duras) said, that’s because the characters are responding to the unconscious content of each other’s words, they are conducting conversations on the level of the unconscious. A similar thing happens in Cain’s fiction. I feel transported to an uncanny, almost surreal-seeming world, yet all the events feel deeply recognizable to me, as though I myself have lived them in a former life. This is quite different from the strangeness-for-the-sake-of-strangeness quality that annoys me in some examples of experimental fiction. Cain’s strangeness is striking & resonant because it expresses an actual unconscious reality that has been suppressed, neglected. I recognize this world because all my life I’ve sensed it running along in parallel with the dominant world, I’ve sensed it but have not had the language to describe it.
So there’s a simultaneous sense of the very small and the very large in Cain’s fictional world. It’s like a Buddhist ecology: everything you do affects everyone else, past present and future. Creatures have counterparts who may be very far away; they can’t see their counterpart but they can feel the counterpart’s influence. They also feel the influence of those who are nearby.
In fact, there’s a deep ecology at work in Cain’s stories, an ecology of desire & relation where emotions form the connective tissue that govern the movements of people towards and away from each other. The dominant emotion is love, an inexplicable kind of longing that may or may not be expressively sexual, but is always erotic. The stories revolve around points of contact which fit together a bit askew yet are part of a larger coherent system, like the microcosmic Warsaw apartment community in Krzysztof Kieslowski's Decalogue. Characters often approach one another with an arbitrary, almost childlike sentiment reminiscent of Jane Bowles. Humans and animals move in a continuum, we are all creatures in Cain’s world, which is arguably a feminine world. Once I was talking with a friend about the kinds of dialogue that characters have with one another in Marguerite Duras stories, the strange quality of literal disconnect between one character’s statement and the other character’s response, yet this literal disconnect actually feels like a deep emotional resonance. And this friend (who absolutely loves Duras) said, that’s because the characters are responding to the unconscious content of each other’s words, they are conducting conversations on the level of the unconscious. A similar thing happens in Cain’s fiction. I feel transported to an uncanny, almost surreal-seeming world, yet all the events feel deeply recognizable to me, as though I myself have lived them in a former life. This is quite different from the strangeness-for-the-sake-of-strangeness quality that annoys me in some examples of experimental fiction. Cain’s strangeness is striking & resonant because it expresses an actual unconscious reality that has been suppressed, neglected. I recognize this world because all my life I’ve sensed it running along in parallel with the dominant world, I’ve sensed it but have not had the language to describe it.
So there’s a simultaneous sense of the very small and the very large in Cain’s fictional world. It’s like a Buddhist ecology: everything you do affects everyone else, past present and future. Creatures have counterparts who may be very far away; they can’t see their counterpart but they can feel the counterpart’s influence. They also feel the influence of those who are nearby.
January 11, 2014
Like Creature, Amina Cain's second book of stories, which I just read, this is one of the strangest (in the best possible way) books I've ever come across. The stories are so quiet, so deeply felt, both entirely other and intensely familiar at the same time. The emotional landscapes of the characters are enormous and rich, and the fact that almost nothing happens to them in the external world of work and parties and life going on makes their feeling lives seem even deeper, truer, and more highly charged.
December 31, 2021
“i go to some hollow” is a haunting collection of short stories/vignettes. It’s out of print, but as soon as i finished Amina Memory Cain’s other books, “creature” and “indelicacy”, i felt a strong urge to track this one down and devour it. the author was kind enough to mail me a copy when i asked her if there was anywhere i could find it. i’m so thankful that she was willing to do that, because this is a beautiful work.
March 21, 2012
This book has a weird and slightly annoying shape. The stories are about people who don't know if they know each other and can't remember whether they've met themselves. I liked feeling like I was 19, 20, 21. Good sentences and paragraphs and feelings that reminded me of myself, livejournal, maybe Brautigan.
March 4, 2022
I was thrilled to get this book from my interlibrary loan system as it's not available to buy right now. The stories were gorgeous and captivating. If you can get a copy of this and like Amina Cain's work I definitely recommend this story collection.
March 1, 2020
A debut collection that wanders and wraps around quiet moments in the most alluring of ways.
December 29, 2012
Oh my god.
I don't normally go ape shit about short story collections, nor do I normally read them straight through beginning to end, nor do I usually spend time on Goodreads harping about the exceptions to my reading habits regarding short story collections.
But Amina Cain is some kind of minimalism wizard.
Here are some things I USUALLY DESPISE about modern short stories:
1) about nothing
2) not much happens
3) about ordinary people
4) uninteresting
5) self-involved
6) etc.
For nearly all the same reasons, I LOVE AMINA CAIN and THIS BOOK. She breaks all the rules. She is a master. Her writing is clean and beautiful. It is simple. It isn't working really hard to be/sound brilliant, it IS brilliant. It doesn't rely on any stupid prose tricks to hypnotize hapless readers. In fact, the hungry escapist who comes to fiction to be charmed like some schoolgirl will as likely be turned off by Cain's simple unnerving style as enthralled. What does Richard Pryor say about Comedy? 'If nobodys walking out, you're probably not that fucking funny?' Amina Cain does what she does, and I, for one, am mightily impressed.
NO other contemporary short story writer has won me over so completely.
I don't normally go ape shit about short story collections, nor do I normally read them straight through beginning to end, nor do I usually spend time on Goodreads harping about the exceptions to my reading habits regarding short story collections.
But Amina Cain is some kind of minimalism wizard.
Here are some things I USUALLY DESPISE about modern short stories:
1) about nothing
2) not much happens
3) about ordinary people
4) uninteresting
5) self-involved
6) etc.
For nearly all the same reasons, I LOVE AMINA CAIN and THIS BOOK. She breaks all the rules. She is a master. Her writing is clean and beautiful. It is simple. It isn't working really hard to be/sound brilliant, it IS brilliant. It doesn't rely on any stupid prose tricks to hypnotize hapless readers. In fact, the hungry escapist who comes to fiction to be charmed like some schoolgirl will as likely be turned off by Cain's simple unnerving style as enthralled. What does Richard Pryor say about Comedy? 'If nobodys walking out, you're probably not that fucking funny?' Amina Cain does what she does, and I, for one, am mightily impressed.
NO other contemporary short story writer has won me over so completely.
November 13, 2016
This is a collection of stories that never really finds the ground, in the best possible ways. The narrators deal with all of the small things of life, but there is always something off. Something metaphysically wrong with the world, or with them, and the feeling is of floating, of not being able to find yourself, or the center, and knowing that there is something to learn if only you could just grasp it.
This isn't something that many books can do, but this is one of them. The ambiguity isn't annoying or cloying, it feels vital to the stories, and the point of the collection. That grasping for something more, something magical, and something real.
This isn't something that many books can do, but this is one of them. The ambiguity isn't annoying or cloying, it feels vital to the stories, and the point of the collection. That grasping for something more, something magical, and something real.
Want to Read
December 29, 2013Just read the first piece (Black Wings) and can tell this one is going to be best a nibble at a time. There was a lot going on in that first one, and I think it will be even better with repeated exposure. I'm looking forward to wrapping my head around this book. (And thanks to Mark Wallace for the recommendation.)
March 25, 2009
Things happening in the dark, quiet things, small things, little distinction between background and foreground, or is it center/ not center? Like a bike ride in a close, unpopulated place of readers.
Read
April 20, 2017I loaned this book to my ex-girlfriend. she kept it for almost a year, and her possession of it coincided exactly with the deterioration of our relationship. I miss my ex-girlfriend but I love this book.
May 12, 2009
Here is my Brooklyn Rail review:
http://www.brooklynrail.org/2009/05/b...
http://www.brooklynrail.org/2009/05/b...
Want to Read
June 17, 2009i thought this sounded good from a review i read by jackie davis!!!
August 1, 2011
The main characters move around like paper dolls. They don't know what they want or where they're going. It's very sad, but makes for interesting interaction.
July 11, 2012
Love this book!!
November 26, 2014
I very much like this book and what it does.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews