It’s extremely moving to read James Baldwin’s novels, one after the other, & watch him slowly escape the homophobic logic that structures Giovanni’s Room—even if traces of that logic always remain. These & more thoughts on Giovanni’s Room here: garthgreenwell.substack.com/p/more-thoug...

Scholarship applications for my upcoming class, Daddy Augustine: Reading Confessions, close tomorrow at noon ET. I’d love for you to join us. Full info here: www.garthgreenwell.com/classes

Can’t pick a sentence or two to pull, so let me just say, tremendous stuff here and a rare piece of criticism that speaks convincingly to why the art matters to me

This essay about Giovanni's Room by @garthgreenwell.bsky.social is beautiful and moving (as I would expect it to be) harpers.org/archive/2025...

Harper’s gave 6k words to my essay on Giovanni’s Room—very generous for lit crit in a glossy magazine. But the essay is a good bit longer. On the stack this week I shared some of what was cut. Also: why everyone should have a cat nearby when writing a difficult essay. tinyurl.com/4fj97d37

In other news, this critical essay on "Zone of Interest" by @garthgreenwell.bsky.social is both beautiful and provocative. Doing some lesson prep for my screening of ZoI next week and happened upon it. thepointmag.com/criticism/th...

"Any art that excludes the irreparable excludes the possibility of genuine affirmation, as I’m trying to articulate it here; such art can only ever be propaganda for life, which can’t offer us any help at all."

Wonderful essay. Giovanni’s Room was the first Baldwin I read, as an adolescent. Thank you for helping me understand the work of beauty and the work of the irreparable in this book

This is a wonderful article from @garthgreenwell.bsky.social about Baldwin.

“How did I find dignity in a book that seems so determined to strip dignity away from its characters, especially its gay characters? Where did I find affirmation in a book so enamored of the abyss?” @garthgreenwell.bsky.social on affirmation in art harpers.org/archive/2025...

So much of interest here, including the importance of form and style as outside and often antithetical to a "reduction of art to subject matter" + how art can acknowledge doom (even give over to it) while offering us the "equipment for doom's navigation."

“Any art that excludes the irreparable excludes the possibility of genuine affirmation, as I’m trying to articulate it here; such art can only ever be propaganda for life, which can’t offer us any help at all.” @garthgreenwell.bsky.social revisits Giovanni’s Room.

"It is a sense of the inevitable boundedness of our lives, their finitude and fragility, the minuteness of our agency in the face of their contingency, that I worry is excluded by the current usage of the term “affirming” in conversations about art."

I first read Giovanni's Room when I was 14. How did a book built (I now think) on a homophobic logic give me access to dignity? For Harper's, I wrote about why we should complicate our sense of what it means for art to be "affirming." harpers.org/archive/2025...

Tomorrow!

Very grateful to learn that Small Rain has won a 2025 Josephine Miles Award from PEN Oakland. I’m honored to be included among such excellent writers. Full list of honorees below.

Friends in NYC, I’m so excited to talk about Small Rain with my friend Brandon Taylor. Friday, Oct 24 at The Strand. Full info and tickets: www.eventbrite.com/e/garth-gree...

oh wow this is exorbitantly relevant to my interests

This November, I’m teaching an online class on Augustine’s Confessions. One of the things we’ll focus on is how Augustine makes thinking dramatic—a kind of narrative action. 6 sessions, all recorded. I’d love for you to join us. Full info & registration here: www.garthgreenwell.com/classes-ig

Friends in Baltimore, I’d love to see you this Sunday, 9/14, at noon at the Baltimore Book Fest, where I’ll be in conversation with Alicia Puglionesi. Full info here: www.eventbrite.com/e/garth-gree...

For the next To a Green Thought Book Club, we’ll be reading Tash Aw’s Booker-longlisted THE SOUTH. Sunday, Oct 12 at 3pm ET. Open to all Founding Members of the newsletter. I’d love for you to join us. Full info here: garthgreenwell.substack.com/p/an-ideal-o...

Found out about Garth Greenwell’s Augustine class today and gasped. What a dream. (It’s also conveniently during my kiddo’s naptime, which is a major plus). bsky.app/profile/gart...

Tempted to finally commit and read Augustine!

How awesome does this sound?!

I’m teaching a new online class on Augustine’s Confessions—the book that invents much of what’s “modern” about the modern novel. 6 weeks, starting Nov 1. All sessions recorded. Full & partial scholarships available. Full info here: www.garthgreenwell.com/classes-ig

Books by Garth Greenwell, Sally Rooney, Joe Sacco, and more are out in paperback this September!

Very happy to be reading at the University of Michigan on Thurs, Sept 18. Friends & former students in Ann Arbor, it would be great to see you there. Full event info here: events.umich.edu/event/135581

On James Schuyler’s elegy “To Frank O’Hara,” & how his seemingly simple lines (like “and now people you never met will meet / and talk about your work”) contain profundities, even miracles. garthgreenwell.substack.com/p/art-and-fr...

I wrote about friendship & artmaking, & about James Schuyler’s beautiful, fraught friendship w Frank O’Hara. Plus an intensely nerdy close reading of Schuyler’s great elegy for O’Hara, which at once registers & defies the infinite distance of death. garthgreenwell.substack.com/p/art-and-fr...

While I shared with a few close friends my experience in a cardiac ward during COVID (not even my husband could visit), Small Rain by Garth Greenwell, although he had a very different condition than mine, describes the experience far better than I could ever dream of doing. Highly recommended.

Friends in NYC, I’d love to see you at the Center for Fiction this Wednesday, August 20, at 6pm, when I’ll be reading for the Adelphi University MFA program. Free and open to the public. www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening... @adelphiu.bsky.social

There’s not much in James Schuyler’s early life to suggest he would become a great poet—or be remarkable in any way. But clearly there was something the record didn’t catch, because remarkable people kept falling in love with him. garthgreenwell.substack.com/p/there-was-...

Opera, illness, gay cosmopolitans, S&M, glorious poems: I wrote about the poet James Schuyler & Nathan Kernan’s excellent new biography. Free post, no paywall. garthgreenwell.substack.com/p/there-was-... @fsgbooks.bsky.social

For @pioneerwork.bsky.social, Jordan Kisner talks with Garth Greenwell about being ruthless with your art. Read the interview here:

Looking forward to @garthgreenwell.bsky.social's AMA this Sunday at 1 p.m. ET for his Substack paid subscribers. It was lovely to meet the 2025 @penfaulkner.bsky.social winner in Fiction at Bread Loaf last year.

Very happy to see David Szalay’s FLESH on the Booker longlist. Join us later this month as we read it for the To a Green Thought Book Club.

I wrote about gardens (which also meant writing about writing), & how they can provide relief from the self. With assists from Iris Murdoch, Simone Weil, & Andrew Marvell. Free post; no paywall. garthgreenwell.substack.com/p/dolce-far-...

Luis and I have a garden now, and I wrote about how much I love it. Also: announcing a Zoom get together for subscribers. Free post; no paywall. garthgreenwell.substack.com/p/dolce-far-...

70. Small Rain by @garthgreenwell.bsky.social . I've been dreading reliving the early pandemic on fiction, but somehow this is a book about fear, grief, and isolation that affect all of us without relying on the pandemic as its source. Contemplative but never boring. bookshop.org/p/books/smal...

❤️

For the next To a Green Thought Book Club we’ll be reading David Szalay’s Flesh. Sun 24 Aug at 3pm ET. Open to Founding Members of the newsletter. Get more info & join here: garthgreenwell.substack.com/p/an-ideal-o... @scribnerbooks.bsky.social @jonathancape.bsky.social

“…the value of poems is tuning us to a different frequency of existence.” Garth Greenwell, in Small rain, the most wonderful book I have read in ages. #poetry @garthgreenwell.bsky.social

I wrote about how keeping daily notebooks is part of my writing process for both fiction & nonfiction—& how much fun I have with pages like these, where random notes take their first steps toward becoming an essay. garthgreenwell.substack.com/p/catching-i...

I got into the nitty gritty of notebook keeping as a writerly tool for both fiction and nonfiction—and about the three Moleskines I use on a daily basis. With many photos. garthgreenwell.substack.com/p/catching-i...

"Because we aren’t just prone before our feelings [as readers]. We’re also analytical, reflexive creatures; we can step back from our feelings and make them objects of examination; we can submit them (and ourselves) to a process of education."

Small Rain is out now in paperback in the UK, & I’m thrilled that Blackwell’s has chosen it as their Book of the Month for July.

“Some of my most powerful experiences of art have been the result of dwelling in bad feeling to see if it might turn into something else.” —Garth Greenwell yalereview.org/article/gart...

I talked with The Yale Review about a new essay on Miranda July’s All Fours—& why I love the essay form. backmatter.yalereview.org/cp/165940925

The next To a Green Thought Book Club meets in just under two weeks, on 6/29. We’ll be discussing Han Kang’s astonishing We Do Not Part. Meetings are open to all Founding Members, & will be recorded for those who can’t join synchronously. Sign up here: garthgreenwell.substack.com/p/an-ideal-o...