Upstart and Crow, 2024
Small Rain is a marvelous novel: exceptionally vivid, real, and true.
Colm Tóibín, author of The Magician
Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award
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, BBC, Publishers Weekly, The New Statesman, Kirkus, Vulture, Vox, BookPage, Commonweal, Los Angeles Public Library, 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 .
Classes
The Writer’s Life
Sunday, May 4
In workshops and craft classes, I try hard to stay focused on the work at hand: close reading and rigorous writing, the kinds of attention and imagination possible when we treat the writer’s desk as a space free from outside pressures and anxieties.
This is a class about everything else. Here’s how it will work: Each registered participant will complete a form outlining questions and topics you want to hear about. Consider everything on the table: agents, editors, time management, finances, “platforms.” As best I can, and as candidly as I can, I’ll build the seminar around the answers.
Follow on Substack
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.