Spain

About this book

Literary Nonfiction. Womens Studies. "Here we are in Spain." Caren Beilins travelogue lays out a new path for the genre. SPAIN is sly cultural criticism (Blanchot to The Shining) feminist wink post-breakup corrective and portrait of the artist as a young mansplained woman. Our narrator finds herself skeptically at an artist residency in Spain rendering her life into vivid fragments that pop and sting. With acerbic flair Beilin swings an axe into the stuff of memoir. "I dont care to dine with anyone " she proclaims. Reader pull up a chair. "While the other art colonists around her are making the world soft--photographers setting day-long exposures and textile artists felting cocoons--Caren Beilins SPAIN is hard: made and re-made in its mosaic shards. Abject affronted and audacious the resilient narrator who incidentally might faint at a thought if its a rigorous thought who might then rouse wherever in the company of countryside sheep is on the perilous cusp of insight on multiple fronts. She looks up from her book in her book to assert that form is a better heroine than Emma in Madame Bovary and proceeds to read against what was happening. The beginning of the end of fiction."--Brian Blanchfield "Caren Beilins SPAIN is like a Hostel-ization of Ben Lerners Leaving the Atocha Station. Beilins protagonist isnt in Spain on a Fulbright. Rather shes paying her own way at a dubious artist residency with the proceeds of a defunct relationship with an older wealthy man. SPAIN is a fantastic poetic and realistic account of travel in a post-travel world."--Chris Kraus "SPAIN is a genre-bending document of the narrators female migratory writing life through the wounded binoculative molested soul of her nipples. SPAIN is stuffed with poetic axing bicycling pussying traveloguing Rilke-ing Claire Denis-ing reading anti-Spain-ing. This highly inventive highly imaginative book relentlessly disrupts the contemporary order of memoir writing. Beilin goes to the moon and back and is not afraid to be scandalous or poetic or whimsical or ethical at a moments notice."--Vi Khi Nao