Sigrid Nunez’s most recent book, The Friend, received the 2018 National Book Award for fiction. Her eighth novel, What Are You Going Through, will be published in September. (June 2020)
What happens when someone sets out to write fiction that is “100 percent pornographic and 100 percent high art”? According to Garth Greenwell, that was one of his goals in writing Cleanness, a collection of stories so connected they can be read as a novel (he himself has called the book a lieder cycle) and which includes several graphic descriptions of sex, some loving and tender, some brutally S&M, and all tending to read autobiographically.
