City Lights celebrates the Dorothy Project
with Amina Cain & Giada Scodellaro and Renee Gladman
An evening of readings and discussion celebrating two new books from Dorothy A HORSE AT NIGHT by Amina Cain, and the debut collection, SOME OF THEM WILL CARRY ME, by Giada Scodellaro. The evening will be moderated by Renee Gladman.
About A HORSE AT NIGHT by Amina Cain:
In Amina Cain’s first nonfiction book, a series of essayistic inquiries come together to form a sustained meditation on writers and their works, on the spaces of reading and writing fiction, and how these spaces take shape inside a 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. 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 William H. Gass’s On Being Blue, books that are virtuosic arguments for—and beautiful demonstrations of—the essential unity of writing and life.
About SOME OF THEM WILL CARRY ME:
A fiercely original debut collection centers Black women in moments of imminent change.
Giada Scodellaro’s stories range in length, style, and tone—a collage of social commentary, surrealism, recipes, folklore, and art. What brings them together is a focus on experiences of black women in moments of dislocation, and a cinematic prose style saturated with detail: a child’s legs bent upon the small bosom of their mother, three-piece suits floating in a river, a man holding a rotting banana during sex, wet cardboard, a woman walking naked through a traffic tunnel. In language that is lyrical, minimal, and often absurd, the diverse stories in Some of Them Will Carry Me deconstruct contemporary life while building a surprising new reality of language, intimacy, and loss.
Amina Cain is the author of two collections of stories—Creature (Dorothy, 2013) and I Go To Some Hollow (Les Figues, 2009)—and the novel Indelicacy (FSG, 2020), which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a finalist for the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Granta, The Paris Review Daily, BOMB, n+1, and the Believer Logger. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, the writer Amarnath Ravva.
Giada Scodellaro is a writer and photographer born in Naples, Italy and raised in the Bronx, NY. She holds an MFA from the New School. Some of Them Will Carry Me is her first book.
Renee Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of poetry, prose, drawing and architecture. She is the author of fourteen published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians—Event Factory (2010), The Ravickians (2011), Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge (2013) and Houses of Ravicka (2017)—as well as three collections of drawings: Prose Architectures (2017), One Long Black Sentence, a series of white ink drawings on black paper, indexed by Fred Moten (2020), and Plans for Sentences (2022). Recent essays and visual work have appeared in POETRY Magazine, The Paris Review, Gulf Coast, Granta, Harper’s, BOMB magazine, e-flux and n+1. She has been awarded fellowships, artist grants, and residencies from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Lannan Foundation, and KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), and is a 2021 Windham-Campbell Prize winner in fiction. She makes her home in New England with poet-ceremonialist Danielle Vogel.
The Dorothy project is an award-winning feminist press dedicated to works of fiction or near fiction or about fiction. Each fall, Dorothy publishes two new books simultaneously. They work to pair books that draw upon different aesthetic traditions, because a large part of their interest in literature lies in its possibilities, its endless stylistic and formal variety. The press is named for its editor’s great-aunt Dorothy Traver, a librarian, rose gardener, animal lover, children’s book author, and bookmobile driver who gifted her niece books stamped with an owl bookplate.
This event has been made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation.