Upstart and Crow, 2024
“Small Rain is a marvelous novel: exceptionally vivid, real, and true.”
- Colm Tóibín, author of The Magician
Winner of the 2025 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
Winner of the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Literary 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, El Periódico, El País, RockDelux, Australian Book Review, DNA Magazine, Librotea, Cadena Ser, 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.
Online Classes
Why We Love Henry James
Online Class: Starting in September 2026
Saturdays, 1:00-2:30pm ET.
You don’t have to love Henry James to take these classes—James is my favorite fiction writer, I love him enough for all of us—but my hope is that by the end of them you’ll be a convert. Over these six classes, which can be taken individually but are designed as a sequence, we will read, relatively slowly and as carefully as we can, some of the greatest works of fiction in the English language.
James is a crucial bridge between the Victorian novel of George Eliot and the modernism of Virginia Woolf (whom James, who was friends with her parents, knew from her infancy)—and a primary source of the interiority, the focus on consciousness, that is one of the defining traits of the modern. His sentences are adventures, unfolding marvels; and he brings an intricacy and inventiveness to metaphor and imagery unmatched by anybody until Proust.
You don't need to be a writer to take these classes; passionate readers are also very welcome. But we will take a writerly approach to reading and discussing these books, paying special attention to craft and style. We’ll also repeatedly ask what it means to engage as writers, in a sustained, intense way, with a great writer of the past—and why such engagement is so crucial a part of an ongoing aesthetic education.
Follow on Substack
“Garth Greenwell’s To a Green Thought is full of his meticulous and passionate prose—reason enough to subscribe. A Substack of real substance, it contains beautifully argued works of criticism, including close readings of Greenwell’s favorite books and films and generous explorations on literary craft. There are also personal essays on such thorny and difficult subjects as money and writing, and the experience of being reviewed, written with bracing intelligence and disarming honesty; the entire publication is a gift.”
— Katie Kitamura, Cultured Magazine