Garth Greenwell's profound and luminous novel, now in paperback: “More than a medical chronicle . . . [A] poetic happening, marked by terror and grace” (The Wall Street Journal).
 
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 health-care 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.
 
Contributor Bio(s)
 
Garth Greenwell is the author of two previous works of fiction, Cleanness and What Belongs to You. The recipient of honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award for prose style from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he is currently a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University.