Cleanness

‘Incandescent ... [Greenwell's] writing about sex is altogether scorching. You pick his novels up with asbestos mitts, and set them down upon trivets to protect your table from heat damage ...Greenwell has an uncanny gift, one that comes along rarely. Every detail in every scene [of Cleanness] glows with meaning. It’s as if, while other writers offer data, he is providing metadata ...This writer’s sentences are so dazzlingly fresh that it as if he has thrown his cape in the street in front of each one.’ ―Dwight Garner, New York Times Book Review

 ‘Extraordinary ... The overall effect is even more impressive than [What Belongs to You] ... The range in these stories is part of their triumph and part of what makes their existential sorrow so profound ... Incomparably bittersweet ... Brilliant.’ ―Ron Charles, Washington Post

‘Absolutely spellbinding . . . Exquisite in its handling of what for many readers will be

taboo territory.’ Boston Globe

 ‘In much the way that other male American writers, such as Hemingway, Baldwin and Edmund White, have chosen Paris as the place in which their lone protagonist can be tested and changed, Greenwell uses Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, as his cauldron ... [He] displays an extraordinary skill at handling time ... [The titular story is] an exquisite piece of writing.’

―Colm Tóibín, The New York Times Book Review

‘An electrifying portrait of sex’s power to lacerate and liberate, to make and unmake our deepest selves … [Greenwell] melds an incantatory cadence with the catechistic language of porn, which is ridiculous until you’re ‘lit up with a longing that makes it the most beautiful language in the world.’ … Intimately powerful.’ Harper’s

‘It’s difficult to explain just how much depth there is to Greenwell’s writing; suffice it to say there are things he accomplishes, emotional destinations he reaches in the course of a sentence that many other writers can’t get to over the course of a whole novel.’

―Omar El Akkad, The Millions

‘Greenwell’s writing―long, dense sentences that often seem to act as heat-seeking missiles―seems married perfectly to the form of this book, where the usual narrative stitching of a novel is done away with. What we are left with are precise evocations of emotion and heat (and what heat! There is so much heat in this book it is sometimes difficult to hold). [Cleanness] thrums with life; it invites readers to a state of higher intensity, such that as you move through it you begin to feel an awareness of and an awe at the possibility that life could actually be lived that way.’ Los Angeles Times

‘A tale of tumultuous romances, [Cleanness] is explicitly―almost incandescently―erotic. In scenes containing both tenderness and violence, Greenwell showcases his powers as a taxonomist of touch.’ Paris Review

‘Cleanness is a sublime book, transcending not only autofiction or LGBTQ writing, but the very barrier between stories and novel, fiction and non-fiction, Chicago Review of Books