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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 and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, it was named a Best Book of 2016 by over fifty publications in nine countries, and is being translated into a dozen languages. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, A Public Space, and VICE, and he has written criticism for The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, and the New York Times Book Review, among others. He lives in Iowa City.
Garth Greenwell's website
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Meghan O'Rourke Small Rain stages a writer's confrontation with mortality and unimaginable pain—a medical crisis which brings him into the grips of a bureaucratic medical system. Why did you think this was the material for a novel?
Garth Greenwell The book is not autobiography, but I underwent a medical crisis in 2020 similar to the narrator's and emerged from it utterly bewildered—about what my body had undergone, about what the experience meant for my understanding of my life. That state of bewilderment is what compels writing for me, or at least novel writing. I think we need art because there are situations we can't think about with our other tools for thinking. I couldn't reason my way to an understanding of what had happened to me; I needed to dwell in it. And to do that I needed the tools of fiction: character and scene, and also the peculiar pressure of the aesthetic.
By "aesthetic," I just mean work whose meaning resides not just in its content, in what it says, but in its medium. In aesthetic writing, the nondenotative aspects of language—syntax, image, repetition, rhythm, the deep histories of words—become dense with meaning and emotion; they exert a pressure on connotative meaning; they allow ...
Rachel Cusk is the author of Second Place, the Outline trilogy, the memoirs A Life's Work and Aftermath, and several other works of fiction and nonfiction. She is a Guggenheim Fellow. She lives in Paris. (more)
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Small Rain
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Paul Kalanithi was a neurosurgeon and writer. He grew up in Kingman, Arizona, and graduated from Stanford University with a BA and MA in English literature and a BA in human biology. He earned an MPhil in history and ... (more)
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Small Rain
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