Patrick Carey

His writing is simple.

It's extremely emotionally precise to a point where it feels sometimes like your brain has written it yourself.

I mean, I do identify deeply with his protagonists.

He is an ex-poet before becoming a prose writer, so the imagery is beautiful.

But he's just so totally in command of his craft.

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 i

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.

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 is to develop a language for queer experience that isn't expressed in what we might call

heterosexual literature.

And I think, you know, when you're writing about sex acts that don't feature widely in the social discourse, maybe being explicit is necessary because you need to communicate exactly what's going on.