Description
“Small Rain” by Garth Greenwell (2024)
Village English Book Club with Marco Astolfi
“A story about pain becomes an outstanding book about love and happiness.” –The New Yorker
A poet’s life is turned inside out by a sudden, wrenching pain. The pain brings him to his knees, and eventually to the intensive care unit. Confined to bed, plunged into the dysfunctional American healthcare system, he struggles to understand what is happening to his body, as someone who has lived for many years in his mind. Time expands and contracts. Sudden intimacies bloom. Set at the furthest edges of human experience, where the forces that give life value—art, memory, poetry, music, care—are thrown into sharp relief, “Small Rain” surges beyond the hospital to encompass a radiant vision of human life: our shared vulnerability, the limits and possibilities of sympathy, the ideal of art and the fragile dream of America. Above all, this is a love story of the most unexpected kind.
About the Village Book Club
Book lovers and bookworms have been meeting on a bimonthly basis to discuss works of fiction and non-fiction (novels, biographies, and essays) focused on or related to LGBTQIA+ themes and personalities. Anticipating insightful discussions, we choose the next book two months in advance.
The discussion will be conducted in English.
Marco Astolfi is a literary translator, writer and fairy from Italy. He lives in Berlin, is a co-organizer of the Village Heart Circle for GBTQ men and runs the Book Club evening every two months. He is a regular at Creative Writing and can occasionally be found modeling for Life Drawing classes. He attended the One Year Training in 2018 and led the Cock O’Clock workshops at Easter Stretch Festival 2019 and Private Talk at Stretch Imagina 2020.
General Information
• While the evening discussions are conducted in English, participants are welcome to read the selected books in their preferred language.
• Free event with registration
** This event is part of the we are village program ‘Belonging versus Lonelines**‘, with the support of LADS**.
Learn more about the program here.
