September 3, 2024
We were thrilled to welcome Garth Greenwell, the award-winning author of Cleanness and What Belongs to You, to celebrate his latest book, Small Rain, a searching, sweeping novel set at the furthest edges of human experience.
Small Rain opens with a medical crisis that plunges one poet into the dysfunctional American healthcare system and close to death. Confined to bed and accustomed to living primarily in his mind, he struggles to understand what is happening to his body. Time expands and contracts. Sudden intimacies bloom. The forces that give life value—art, memory, poetry, music, care—are thrown into sharp relief. Small Rain surges beyond the physical limits of our immediate spaces to encompass a radiant vision of human life: One that acknowledges 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.
Alexandra Schwartz, Staff Writer at the New Yorker and co-host of the magazine’s Critics at Large podcast, joined Greenwell for a discussion of his novel and of life’s most intimate and overwhelming mysteries: illness, art-making, and love.
Featured Book
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Small Rain
By Garth Greenwell
Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux
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.
In Conversation
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Garth Greenwell
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 six other awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His second book of fiction, Cleanness, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and was longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, the L.D. and LaVerne Harrell Clark Fiction Prize, and France’s Prix Sade (Deuxième sélection). His fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, A Public Space, and VICE, and he has written nonfiction for the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, and Harper’s, among others. Greenwell currently lives in New York, where he is a Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at NYU.
Photo Credit: Oriette D'Angelo
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Alexandra Schwartz
Alexandra Schwartz
Alexandra Schwartz is a staff writer at the New Yorker, and a co-host of the magazine’s Critics at Large podcast. She was awarded the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing in 2015.
Photo Credit: Dan Winters
