Upstart and Crow, 2024
Small Rain is a marvelous novel: exceptionally vivid, real, and true.
Colm Tóibín, author of The Magician
Longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction
A New York Public Library Top Ten Book of 2024
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, The Washington Post, NPR, Publishers Weekly, The New Statesman, Kirkus, Vulture, Vox, BookPage, and the Chicago Public Library.
A medical crisis brings one man close to death―and to love, art, and beauty―in a profound and luminous novel by award-winning author Garth Greenwell.
A poet's life is turned inside out by a sudden, wrenching pain. The pain brings him to his knees, and eventually to the ICU. Confined to bed, plunged into the dysfunctional American healthcare system, he struggles to understand what is happening to his body, as someone who has lived for many years in his mind.
This is a searching, sweeping novel set at the furthest edges of human experience, where the forces that give life value―art, memory, poetry, music, care―are thrown into sharp relief. Time expands and contracts. Sudden intimacies bloom. Small Rain surges beyond the hospital to encompass a radiant vision of human life: our shared vulnerability, the limits and possibilities of sympathy, the ideal of art and the fragile dream of America. Above all, this is a love story of the most unexpected kind.
Garth
Greenwell
Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You, which won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for many other awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, the LA Times Book Prize, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
His second book, Cleanness, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and was longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and the Prix Sade, among others. A New York Times Notable Book, it was named a Best Book of 2020 by over thirty publications.
His new novel, Small Rain, was published in September.
His cultural criticism has appeared widely, and he writes regularly about books, music, and film for the Substack newsletter To a Green Thought. A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of the 2021 Vursell Award for prose style from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he is currently a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University.
Keep up with him on Substack .
Mark Armijo McKnight, 2021
Classes
How to Write Sex (and Why)
If sex scenes are so hard to write, as everyone seems to agree they are, why do writers keep trying?
Few topics are so fraught as writing sex. It’s impossible to do well, people sometimes say, or it’s not worth trying. I once heard a teacher at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop describe her ideal sex scene as two characters sitting down on a sofa, followed by white space. And yet sex is one of the great territories of human experience, and great writers continue to be drawn to it.
In two online sessions, we’ll consider why sex can be so powerful in fiction, offering tools for exploring character, context, and theme. We'll consider the logistical questions of how to represent sex, the mechanics of bodies in space; we’ll also ask how sex can serve other aspects of fiction: subjectivity, conflict, structure, time, style. And we’ll see how writers have used sex as a generator of expansive meaning, posing questions both existential and metaphysical.
We’ll do all this by close-reading examples of classic sex writing, including work by DH Lawrence, Baldwin, Mary McCarthy, and Toni Morrison, as well as brilliant recent writing by Torrey Peters, Raven Leilani, Pedro Lemebel, Lidia Yuknavitch, Miranda July, and others.
1:00 - 3:00pm ET, Saturday, Jan 18 & Jan 25
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To a Green Thought is a twice-monthly newsletter about music, art, film, and books.
Think of this as a kind of workshop for playing with ideas in a more freewheeling, less responsible way than in my more formal criticism. I’ll also write, from time to time, on the work of my friends, and I’ll share more general thoughts about writing and the writing world.
I have fun writing these posts, and I hope you’ll have fun reading them. And maybe you’ll discover some writers, musicians, and artists who are new to you.