Cleanness - Hardcover

Greenwell, Garth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374124582 ISBN 13: 9780374124588

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020

Synopsis

In the highly anticipated follow-up to his beloved debut, What Belongs to You, Garth Greenwell deepens his exploration of foreignness, obligation, and desire

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 another foreigner 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, he transcribes the strange dialects of desire, cementing his stature as one of our most vital living writers.

About this title

About the Author:

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 New York Times Book Review, among other publications. He lives in Iowa City.

Review:

Advance Praise for Cleanness

“So rarely do words make comprehensible the inevitability and confusion of desire as Garth Greenwell’s writing does. His sensibility is akin to James Baldwin’s, and he observes the world with eyes like those of Tolstoy. With shimmering prose and undiluted intensity, Cleanness captures the indefinableness of pain and intimacy, love and alienation, vulnerability and sustainability.”
―Yiyun Li, author of Where Reasons End

“In Cleanness, I found an end to a loneliness I didn't know―until now―how to describe. Greenwell maps the worlds our language walls off―sex, love, shame and friendship, the foreign and the familiar―and finds the sublime. There are visceral shocks like I’ve never encountered in print, and they delighted me, again and again. With each plunge we take beneath the surface of life, lost and new worlds appear. This could only be the work of a master.”
―Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

“Cleanness reaches into the relationship between masculinity and violence with more depth than any book I’ve read in a very long time, and it does it by elaborating both the tender and brutal means that men who try to love other men employ to survive the violence they inherited and the violence they still possess. It is, in the best sense, a disturbing book for the simple reason that it speaks the truth.”
―Adam Haslett, author of Imagine Me Gone

“Garth Greenwell’s sentences are magical and spellbinding. They breathe, and are alive in completely unpredictable ways. Words are voyages, says John Donne. He’s a novelist whose art makes a poet stands on his toes.”
―Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2020
• ISBN 10: 0374124582
• ISBN 13: 9780374124588
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240