Garth Greenwell + Brandon Taylor: Small Rain

Join us for a paperback release event with award-winning author Garth Greenwell, discussing his latest novel Small Rain. Joining Garth in conversation is fellow award-winning author and editor at Smith & Taylor Classics Brandon Taylor. This event will be hosted in the Strand Book Store's 3rd floor Rare Book Room at 828 Broadway on 12th Street.

Can’t make the event? Purchase a signed copy of Small Rain here.

ACCESSIBILITY:

Strand Book Store is an ADA compliant venue. The event space is accessible via elevator. Please ask a Strand employee upon arrival for directions to accessible seating if preferred.

ASL interpretation is available for this event by request only. Please reach out to our events team at events@strandbooks.com by Oct. 10 to request.

For further information on accessibility in this space, or to make a request, please contact events@strandbooks.com.

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Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

Long-listed for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, Financial Times, New Statesman, Vox, Elle, Publishers Weekly, and BookPage

A New Yorker Recommended Read of the Year

A New York Public Library, Los Angeles Public Library, and Chicago Public Library Best Book of the Year

A medical crisis brings one man close to death—and to love, art, and beauty—in a profound and luminous novel by award-winning author Garth Greenwell.

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 healthcare 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.

Photo credit: Bryan Schutmaat

Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You, Cleanness, and Small Rain, which won the 2025 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His cultural criticism has appeared widely, and he writes regularly about books, music, and film for the Substack newsletter To a Green Thought. A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of the 2021 Vursell Award for prose style from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he is currently a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University.

Brandon Taylor is an Editor at Unnamed Press and co-founder of Smith & Taylor Classics. He is the author of Minor Black Figures, The Late Americans, Real Life, a finalist of the Booker Prize and the NBCC John Leonard Prize, and Filthy Animals, winner of The Story Prize and a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Cut, Vulture, and elsewhere.