Little Theaters of Heat

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Christopher Frizzelle shares a dazzling review of Garth Greenwell’s debut novel, What Belongs to You, praising its ferocity and intense exploration of homosexuality:

These “little theaters of heat,” these packets of desire or panic or imminence, these doublings-down of doubt and upswellings of confidence—these concentrations of feeling are Greenwell’s subject. The novel is explicitly set in Bulgaria, but implicitly it is set on the staging ground of intensity itself. For all its attempts to get outdoors (the sea, a hike, train rides), it is a novel most compelling at its most interior. Physical reality seems to melt around the novel’s hot core of feeling.


Olivia Wetzel is a student taking time off to live and work in San Francisco. If she could be any animal, she’d be a penguin. She’s never eaten pepperoni before, and one of her feet is a whole size bigger than the other. More from this author →