On Being Reviewed

Reading Parul Sehgal & Dwight Garner on Small Rain

My third novel, Small Rain, has just been published. Please pick up a copy at your local bookstore, or you can find links to online retailers here. The UK edition will be out 19 Sept; links for UK readers are here.

Since this is a post about what it feels like to be reviewed, let me start with some media highlights from the past couple of weeks:

• In The Washington Post, a beautiful review by Charles Arrowsmith, who calls Small Rain “timeless” and “a daring, mysterious work that audaciously and successfully marries the physical and the metaphysical.”

• In The Atlantic, Walt Hunter thinks about how the book turns to poetry in an attempt to narrate pain.

• In a very beautiful essay for his Substack,

  Entertainment, Weakly
  , Patrick Nathan writes about the novel’s argument for art and poetry as resisting instrumentalized economies of time.

• This very attentive essay by Andrew van der Vlies in the Times Literary Supplement explores similar questions. “The ethos of Small Rain, by contrast, is to set one’s head against the weather – to refuse the expedient and efficient, to insist that the only self worth celebrating is one undone and remade, not pandered to in its narrow appetites.”

• In Compact, Valerie Stivers calls Small Rain “the first great Covid novel.”

• In the Bay Area Reporter, Tim Pfaff calls the novel “Generous, expansive,” and writes that “Everywhere there is verbal astonishment … The concurrence of the actual and the philosophical is rare but precious.”

• For The Yale Review, I got to talk with brilliant Meghan O’Rourke, who calls the novel “An exquisite addition to the literature of illness.”

• I absolutely loved this long conversation with

  Molly Wizenberg
  , which she published at her Substack, in two parts.

• And finally, I’m way too excited about the fact that I got to do a By the Book feature for the NYT. Click here to discover the platonic ideal of literary dinner parties.

It has been such a joy to meet so many readers of this newsletter at events over the past two weeks. Tour continues: you can see the full schedule here. (Note that we’ve added a date in Montreal—my very first trip to that city—in October.) Please come say hi if you can.

And now: I had quite the Monday morning last week.