Sold Out — Garth Greenwell Presents Cleanness with Andrea Lawlor

$10

Admission and $10 off at our bookstore

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Wednesday, 7:00 pm EDT January 15, 2020

The Center for Fiction

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This event is sold out.

Join us for the launch of Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness, a stirring and meditative follow-up to his acclaimed debut novel What Belongs to You. Greenwell will be joined in conversation by Andrea Lawlor, author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl.

Cleanness is a beautifully crafted reflection on sex, violence, love, and loss, told through the voice of a gay American man preparing to leave his teaching post in Bulgaria. As we embark on a heartbreaking journey, our understanding of the impulses behind our brutality and tenderness expands.

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Featuring

  • Greenwell, Garth (c) Oriette D'Angelo

    Garth Greenwell

    Garth Greenwell

    Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You, which won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was long-listed for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for six other awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, it was named a Best Book of 2016 by more than fifty publications in nine countries, and is being translated into a dozen languages. Greenwell’s 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 other publications. Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish his newest books, Cleanness, in January 2020. He lives in Iowa.

  • Andrea Lawlor by Steve Dillion - Carla Cain-Walther

    Andrea Lawlor

    Andrea Lawlor

    Andrea Lawlor teaches writing at Mount Holyoke College, edits fiction for Fence magazine, and has been awarded fellowships by Lambda Literary and Radar Labs. Their writing has appeared in various literary journals including Ploughshares, Mutha, the Millions, jubilat, the Brooklyn Rail, Faggot Dinosaur, and Encyclopedia, Vol. II. Their publications include a chapbook, Position Papers (Factory Hollow Press, 2016), and a novel, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, a 2018 finalist for the Lambda Literary and CLMP Firecracker Awards. Paul, originally published by Rescue Press in 2017, has been re-released in the US by Vintage/Knopf and published in the British Commonwealth by Picador UK.

  1. . 
    CLEANNESS - jacket image - Carla Cain-Walther

    Cleanness

    By Garth Greenwell

    PURCHASE

    Sofia, Bulgaria, a landlocked city in southern Europe, stirs with hope and impending upheaval. Soviet buildings crumble, wind scatters sand from the far south, and political protesters flood the streets with song.

    In this atmosphere of disquiet, an American teacher navigates a life transformed by the discovery and loss of love. As he prepares to leave the place he’s come to call home, he grapples with the intimate encounters that have marked his years abroad, each bearing uncanny reminders of his past. A queer student’s confession recalls his own first love, a stranger’s seduction devolves into paternal sadism, and a romance with a younger man opens, and heals, old wounds. Each echo reveals startling insights about what it means to seek connection: with those we love, with the places we inhabit, and with our own fugitive selves.

    Cleanness revisits and expands the world of Garth Greenwell’s beloved debut, What Belongs to You, declared ‘an instant classic’ by the New York Times Book Review. In exacting, elegant prose, Greenwell transcribes the strange dialects of desire, cementing his stature as one of our most vital living writers.

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