Entertainment Weekly
“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 Toibin,
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.”
One of the many I can’t believe this is real moments that hit me in the first days, back when my wife was the only one who was sick, was when we were speaking to each other through a glass door. I thought to myself, Wait, I wrote this scene once.
She had woken on a Monday morning with body aches, headache, and a fever. In retrospect, she’d been fighting it for a couple days but had thought it was a cold or allergies. Now it was Thursday; she and our asymptomatic (thank God) 10-year-old son had tested positive; our 14-year-old and I had tested negative, though that would soon change.