Join us for a reading from Garth Greenwell's new novel, Small Rain.
** Update: we've received so many RSVPs we had to move this event to a bigger venue!
New location:
THE LINE HOTEL
Mezzanine
1770 Euclid St. NW
Washington DC 20008
*detailed directions at the bottom of the page
About the book:
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.
Advance praise:
“Small Rain is a marvelous novel: exceptionally vivid, real, and true. Garth Greenwell’s sensibility is rich and generous—the narrator's memories are haunting, and his experiences of both illness and love are deeply affecting. You are in the room with him. This is a true achievement, written with engaged humanity and a great command of style.”
—Colm Tóibín, author of The Magician
“I just didn’t put it down . . . I picked it up during every moment that I had in a very, very busy time when I was waiting for my own book to come out . . . This book, like All Fours in a very different way, is about the body . . . I feel like I know the narrator’s body intimately, in a way I don’t think I know the bodies of most of the people I know, because I don’t know what pain is like for them. And I know what pain is like for him. And thus I know what love is like for him and what he has to lose if he dies. I have felt that, I’ve gone to that terrible place that we all hope to avoid of having to look at “what does this matter,” “why does this matter,”“What is love?” even? It ultimately is a very romantic book and incredibly moving.”
--Miranda July (on LARB Radio Hour)
About the author:
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. A new novel, Small Rain, is forthcoming 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.
Johannes Lichtman will be joining Garth Greenwell for a conversation following the reading.
Johannes Lichtman’s debut novel, Such Good Work, was chosen as a 5 Under 35 honoree by the National Book Foundation. His second novel, Calling Ukraine, was named one of the best fiction books of 2023 by Library Journal. His stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Sun, The Paris Review Daily, Foreign Policy, Tin House, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. He lives in Washington, DC.
Directions:
If you enter through the hotel entrance at 1770 Euclid St. NW (with the big stone steps), the mezzanine will be up the stairs immediately to your right.
If you enter through the hotel entrance at 2468 Champlain St. NW, you can ask front desk staff for directions. This entrance is wheelchair accessible and you can take the elevator to the mezzanine.
Please email events@lostcitybookstore.com with any questions.