In today's episode I talk to Garth Greenwell about his novel Small Rain (2024)

Garth Greenwell is the author of three books, most recently Small Rain, which won the 2025 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award. A Guggenheim Fellow, his writing on culture appears widely, including in The New Yorker, The Guardian, Harper’s, and elsewhere; he also writes the Substack newsletter To a Green Thought. He is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University.

Episode notes:

• Close reading of Raven Leilani's Luster
• George Oppen, 'Stranger's Child'
• T.J. Clark, The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing

Book recs:

• Ivana Sajko, Every Time We Say Goodbye

Follow the show on Instagram and subscribe to the Substack for transcripts and more links. Please leave feedback here.

Follow Garth @ggreenwell on Bluesky, Instagram, X and Threads; or @garthgreenwell on Substack and Facebook.

Produced, hosted, and edited by Chris Lloyd.