Small Rain: A Reading and Conversation with Garth Greenwell.
Moderated by Nellie Hermann. / Wednesday, April 2nd, 2025, 6-7pm
For our April rounds we are thrilled to welcome Garth Greenwell, award-winning author of What Belongs to You and Cleanness, who will be speaking about his most recent novel, Small Rain. In Small Rain, 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. Small Rain 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, it is a love story of the most unexpected kind. 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 and the LA Times Book Prize. Garth Greenwell will be in conversation with Nellie Hermann, core faculty of Columbia Narrative Medicine, who has published two novels, The Cure for Grief (Scribner) and The Season of Migration (FSG).