Garth Greenwell: Intimate Truths

The annual Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Awards delights in taking bundles of limbs and badly chosen adjectives, removing them from their context and mocking them for their unsexiness. But there is real power in its opposite: by capturing the truth of physical encounters the finest literature can — without prurience or pornography — illuminate raw truths about being alive.
 
In spare, passionate language that builds on his celebrated debut What Belongs to You, Garth Greenwell is without peer. Over nine interlinking stories, the unnamed narrator provides a searing examination of foreignness, intimacy, memory and desire as he reflects on his life in Sofia, Bulgaria. In conversation with Damian Barr, Greenwell expands on his novel’s haunting meditations on our public and private selves.