Welcome to Litsy!

A tender and powerful novel about one man’s near-death experience—a story about love, pain, art, and our obscure medical system—by the critically acclaimed author of Cleanness. A writer has made a life for himself in Iowa. He teaches, writes when he can, and shares a home with his partner of many years. One day, a sudden and wrenching pain turns him inside out. He tries to ignore it, but it refuses to be ignored—and so he seeks medical care, eventually arriving at the ICU. Small Rain takes place over the course of those amorphous days as he attempts to survive, and understand, the mysterious condition that wrenched him from his life. Plunged into the tightly regulated and often dysfunctional American health-care system, he grows increasingly estranged from everything known. The award-winning author Garth Greenwell’s new novel tells the story of one man confronting mortality—and the forces of art, beauty, and love that keep him alive.