Patrick Carey

He's sensitive.

And the other thing I think that is often missing from these quite literary, especially lyrical books, is he's extremely kind.

I feel like he's very empathetic to his characters, even if they're in unpleasant situations from time to time.

I think it's really one of the really interesting things about this book.

And I think it's worth mentioning the way that I've actually experienced a large portion of this book is four of the sections in this episodic novel that you've mentioned, that you've spoken about, Kate, have been previously published in the New Yorker as short stories.

So when the word first got out that Garth Greenwell's new book was coming out, everyone was referring to it as a collection of short stories.

But now that I've read the whole thing from go to woe,

Yeah, I mean, I think it's closer to a novel than it is to a short story collection, but it's sort of not a novel really either.

I read in an article Greenwell himself referred to it as a song cycle, which I think is beautiful, but also kind of accurate in the sense that it's a collection of small stories in a similar setting that inform

variations on a similar emotional theme.

But yeah, it's sort of hard to kind of pin down exactly what this book is.

Suffice to say, it's very enjoyable to read though.

Yeah, they are remarkably explicit sex scenes.

Yeah, that's right.

That's right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's just an opportunity to perv, really.

No, he doesn't, yeah, he doesn't, he's not a blushing wallflower when it comes to these things.

I mean, I think part of what this book is trying to do, similarly to the Machado in some ways, is to develop a language for...

for queer experience that isn't expressed in what we might call heterosexual literature.