Please join us for a special early release event to celebrate Garth Greenwell’s new novel, Small Rain!  He will be joined in conversation by Jamel Brinkley. Greenwell’s eagerly anticipated book has received praise from authors including Miranda July, “I just didn’t put it down” and Phil Klay, who calls it “a marvel.” Colm Tóibín says, “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.”

Garth Greenwell is the author of Cleanness and 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 six other awards, including the James Tait Black Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His novella Mitko won the Miami University Press Novella Prize and was a finalist for the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and a Lambda Literary Award. His 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 the New York Times Book Review, among others. He lives in Iowa City.

Jamel Brinkley is the author of Witness: Stories, and A Lucky Man: Stories, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. His writing has appeared in A Public Space, Ploughshares, Zoetrope: All-Story, The Paris Review, American Short Fiction, The Yale Review, Guernica, The Threepenny Review, Gulf Coast, Glimmer Train, The Believer, and Tin House, and has been anthologized twice in The Best American Short Stories. He lives in Iowa City and teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Both authors are alumni of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.