Named Ak Metchet, “The White Mosque,” after the Mennonites’ whitewashed church, the village lasted for fifty years. Over a century later, Sofia Samatar joins a tour following their path, fascinated not by the hardships of their journey, but by its aftermath: the establishment of a small Christian village in the Muslim Khanate of Khiva. In the late nineteenth century, a group of German-speaking Mennonites traveled from Russia into Central Asia, where their charismatic leader predicted Christ would return. About The White MosqueĪ historical tapestry of border-crossing travelers, of students, wanderers, martyrs and invaders, The White Mosque is a memoiristic, prismatic record of a journey through Uzbekistan and of the strange shifts, encounters, and accidents that combine to create an identity A Horse at Night: On Writing is an intimate reckoning with the contemporary moment, and a quietly brilliant contribution to the lineage of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own or Gass’s On Being Blue, books that are virtuosic arguments for-and beautiful demonstrations of-the essential unity of writing and life. Driven by primary questions of authenticity and freedom in the shadow of ecological and social collapse, Cain moves associatively through a personal canon of authors- including Marguerite Duras, Elena Ferrante, Renee Gladman, and Virginia Woolf- and topics as timely and various as female friendships, zazen meditation, neighborhood coyotes, landscape painting, book titles, and the politics of excess. “I adore her work, and sensibility,” writes Claire-Louise Bennett of Amina Cain and Jenny Offill: “Cain writes beautiful precise sentences about what it means to wander through this luminous world.” Cain’s unique wandering sensibility, her attention to the small and the surprising, finds a profound new expression in her first nonfiction book, a sustained meditation on writers and their work. Amina Cain is our generous, gentle guide through an exquisite library. It asks us to consider fiction as life and life as fiction. “ A Horse at Night is like light from a candle in the evening: intimate, pleasurable, full of wonder. REGISTER HERE About A Horse at Night: On Writing This event will be streamed on our Crowdcast channel.

Point Reyes Books Lighthouse SweatshirtĪmina Cain and Sofia Samatar join us for a conversation about their new books, A Horse at Night: On Writing (Dorothy) and The White Mosque (Catapult).Thinking Like a Mountain - Annual Subscription.

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