Garth Greenwell
“If there is a gay ghetto, then that’s where James Baldwin is, and Thomas Mann is, and Virginia Woolf is, and that’s the only place I would ever want to be. And that’s not on the margins of the literary tradition: That’s right at the heart of it.”
“Garth Greenwell, whose first book is a masterpiece, amazingly has written a second book that is also a masterpiece. The great enterprise that Joyce and Lawrence began—to write with utter literal candor about sex, grounding one’s moral life and philosophical insight in what that candor reveals about us—finds fulfillment, a late apotheosis, in Greenwell’s work. Cleanness is the act of a master.”
“Cleanness is stunning, provocatively revelatory and atmospherically profound. Here is love and sex as art, as pulse, as truth.”
“In Cleanness, I found an end to a loneliness I didn’t know―until now―how to describe. Greenwell maps the worlds our language walls off―sex, love, shame and friendship, the foreign and the familiar―and finds the sublime. There are visceral shocks like I’ve never encountered in print, and they delighted me, again and again. With each plunge we take beneath the surface of life, lost and new worlds appear. This could only be the work of a master.”
“I don’t know how Garth Greenwell writes such delicate, profane fiction. These stories are grace and salt, tenderness and shadow. Reading this book made me want to sit with my emotions and desires; it made me want to be a better writer.”
Garth Greenwell is the author of the acclaimed Cleanness (FSG, 2020), a work of fiction that Colm Tóibín, writing in a review featured on the cover of The New York Times Book Review, called, “bravura writing” and “brilliantly executed.” Frank Bidart hailed it as “a masterpiece”, and compared Greenwell to Joyce and Lawrence. Cleanness was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and was longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and France’s Prix Sade. It was named a New York Times Notable Book, a New York Times Critics Top 10 Book of the Year, and a Best Book of 2020 by The New Yorker, TIME, NPR, the BBC, and more than 30 other publications. It is being translated into seven languages.
Greenwell’s first novel, What Belongs to You (FSG, 2016), 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. A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, it was named a Best Book of 2016 by over fifty publications in nine countries, was praised as “the great gay novel for our times” by The New Republic, and has been translated into fourteen languages. His short 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 Harpers, among others.
Among the praise Greenwell has received, noted critic James Wood wrote in The New Yorker, “In an age of the sentence fetish, Greenwell thinks and writes, as Woolf or Sebald do, in larger units of comprehension.” He praised the “ . . . Rhythm, order, music, and lucid expression” of Greenwell’s style, and noted that ... “if the novel's formal control has a rare delicacy there is nothing at all hermetic about the story the narrator tells, which has a bitter urgency.” Ron Charles, book critic for The Washington Post, said, "What Belongs to You whispers like an incantation of desire ... In Greenwell’s poetic sentences, emotional fearlessness is mated with extraordinary sensitivity to the tremors of regret.” Of Cleanness, The New Yorker’s Alex Ross wrote, “These stories are masterpieces of radical eroticism … Tenderness, violence, animosity, and compassion are the outer edges of what feels like a total map of the human condition.” The Times Literary Supplement called Greenwell “the finest writer of sex currently at work … certainly the most exhilarating,” and Sigrid Nunez, in the New York Review of Books, declared that “Compassion, that supreme quality in a fiction writer, is a main source of Greenwell’s power.”
When asked about being labeled a “gay writer” in an interview that appeared in Guernica, Greenwell said, “I feel an intense debt to the queer writers who made my life—my life as a writer, my life full stop—possible, and I hope very much that I’m continuing a tradition of queer writing. I also absolutely reject any suggestion that by writing specifically queer stories and in aesthetic traditions or modes that have been coded as queer I am sacrificing any of the universal relevance or impact literature can lay claim to. I write from my experience as a queer man, and I write for queer readers. I also write out of my sense of the literary tradition, broadly conceived, and I write into and for that tradition. I am a gay writer, absolutely. And in no way does that fact limit the reach or importance of what I write.”
Greenwell holds graduate degrees from Harvard University, Washington University in St. Louis, and the Iowa Writers Workshop. He has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop; the University of Mississippi, where he was the 2018-19 John and Renée Grisham Writer in Residence; Grinnell College; and NYU. A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, he received the 2021 Harold D. Vursell Award for distinguished prose style from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Iowa City.
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