Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. Women's Studies. BLACKFISHING THE IUD is a daring and demanding memoir by author, Caren Beilin, about reproductive health and the IUD, gendered illness, medical gaslighting, and activism in the chronic illness community. Rhapsodic and unabashedly polemical, Beilin scrutinizes the literary, artistic, and medical history of Rheumatoid Arthritis, as she considers the copper IUD's role in triggering her sudden onset of chronic autoimmunity. As the title makes abundantly clear, the book is an argument that the copper IUD is sickening quite a lot of women--and that we listen first and foremost to women's testimony to begin to resolve it. "BLACKFISHING THE IUD is a necessary and searing polemic. Deftly shifting between literary history and emerging scientific research, Caren Beilin defiantly insists on the truth of her own experience--and demands that medicine take the anecdotal reports of women like her seriously."--Maya Dusenbery As I read I thought of alchemy, Beilin is an alchemist. She transmutes metal, in this case copper, into something that flames and sings and questions and fights. It's a supranatural work that quests after healing but also finds and makes sense in its paradoxes."--Johanna Hedva "'Love does leave you open,' Caren Beilin proves in this heart-breaking, book-breaking work. Beilin opens her memoir of illness to the voices of others harmed by the IUD, a medical device that makes the writer's daily living and thinking into a story of autoimmune disease. Beilin and others who know the risks of being heard and treated as women include us in their generous acts of rage, empathy, gratitude, and information. Reading and writing are witchwork, transforming the isolation of suffering into a tender and common ground. This book reminds us that our bodies are sites of language we can trust and love and offer in forms more radical than we know."--Hilary Plum "In BLACKFISHING THE IUD, Caren Beilin takes on a crucial topic heretofore only broached in online forums--the serious, ongoing health problems associated with the copper IUD--and explodes her investigation into a creative work like no other: rich with wide-ranging references but also retaining the urgency and intimacy of raw, personal forum posts. Dissatisfied with the non-answers offered by medicine, Beilin seeks to understand the harm done by the IUD through philosophy, literature, and daily life. By writing the IUD through literature, philosophy, bookselling, and birdwatching, she identifies it as a problem that reaches far beyond 'women's health' into society at large."--Amy Berkowitz

From the author of Blackfishing the IUD, a darkly hilarious novel about familial trauma, chronic illness, academic labor, and contemporary art. In the tradition of Rabelais, Swift, and Fran Ross—the tradition of biting satire that joyfully embraces the strange and fantastical—and drawing upon documentary strategies from Sheila Heti, Caren Beilin offers a tale of familial trauma that is also a broadly inclusive skewering of academia, the medical industry, and the contemporary art scene. One day Iris, an adjunct at a city arts college, receives a terrible package: recently unearthed letters that her father had written to her in her teens, in which he blames her for their family’s crises. Driven by the raw fact of receiving these devastating letters not once but twice in a lifetime, and in a panic of chronic pain brought on by rheumatoid arthritis, Iris escapes to the countryside—or some absurdist version of it. Nazi cows, Picassos used as tampons, and a pair of arthritic feet that speak in the voices of Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet are standard fare in this beguiling novel of odd characters, surprising circumstances, and intuitive leaps, all brought together in profoundly serious ways.

Fiction. Olivia Knox has womb duplicatum, a rare affliction of continuous menstruation. Blood it is not just blood tumbles unstoppably during her freshman year at the University of Pennsylvania. This problem of excess blood full of marbles and beans, something thick enough to be black, sometimes sick enough to be brown, sometimes wild, almost violet again foregrounds Beilin's revision (queer and erotic) of Pennsylvania's foundations. Tracing a relationship between George Fox and William Penn, Bethlehem's industrial boom, Jewish suburbia and Amish farming, and the origins of surgical education in America, THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA convenes at the University of Pennsylvania, where Olivia Knox confronts a surgical solution. "Caren Beilin's prose isn't like other people's prose or other people's anything. Her engine is the sentence, but it runs on fuel from other worlds. THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA is unhinged, just the thing to remove your skin. Everything will feel intense because it is. How many books can reroute your dreams like this?" Ander Monson "A book from the future to be savored again and again." Anne Marie Wirth Cauchon "No one writes like Caren Beilin. If Angela Carter got commingled with Gary Lutz in Lara Glenum's Miraculating Machine, they might have produced the kinds of sentences found in THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA. Part family gothic, part queer historiography, Beilin's book conjures a Pennsylvania made of butter, gelatin, and blood, a murderzone in which bleeding girls and boneless horses, patricides and founding fathers interpenetrate, become portmanteau creatures that gorge on taboo. Prepare to feel language at its most vandalous, its most painfully exciting. I had to read parts aloud, to use my mouth as a release valve, or I would have exploded on the spot. Finally, language has an orgasm." Joanna Ruocco "The novel's prose is astonishing. An important new voice has just entered the literary party. Listen." Lance Olsen"

Literary Nonfiction. Women's Studies. "Here we are, in Spain." Caren Beilin's 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 don't 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 Beilin's 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 it's 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 Beilin's SPAIN is like a Hostel-ization of Ben Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station. Beilin's protagonist isn't in Spain on a Fulbright. Rather, she's 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 narrator's 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 moment's notice."--Vi Khi Nao

From breast cancer and blood clots to depression and debilitating autoimmune disease, the health of millions of women has been sacrificed to chronic and deadly diseases In the Name of The Pill. This book highlights many of those ailments and examines the role hormonal birth control plays in each. Chapters devoted to individual diseases and conditions include lupus, Multiple Sclerosis, Crohn's disease, infertility, migraines, blood clots, diabetes, hair loss, thyroid and gallbladder disease. Yet, with significantly increased risk for all these conditions, the drug industry still tells us the benefits outweigh the risks. To understand the disconnect, In the Name of The Pill explores the history, economics, and politics that gave us birth control before it was proven safe, and exposes the powerful forces working to keep us in the dark.

Tender Points is a narrative fractured by trauma. Named after the diagnostic criteria for fibromyalgia, the book-length lyric essay explores sexual violence, chronic pain, and patriarchy through lived experience and pop culture.First published in 2015, this new edition includes an afterword by the author.

FINALIST FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION'S FIRST NOVEL PRIZE "Cain’s small but mighty novel reads like a ghost story and packs the punch of a feminist classic." —The New York Times Book Review A haunted feminist fable, Amina Cain’s Indelicacy is the story of a woman navigating between gender and class roles to empower herself and fulfill her dreams. In "a strangely ageless world somewhere between Emily Dickinson and David Lynch" (Blake Butler), a cleaning woman at a museum of art 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—but she is now, however passively, forcing other women to clean up after her. Perhaps another and 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.