Greer's stories have appeared in
Esquire,
The Paris Review,
The New Yorker, and other national publications. They have been anthologized in
The Book of Other People and
The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2009. His third book,
The Confessions of Max Tivoli, was released in 2004; a
New Yorker piece by
John Updike called it "enchanting, in the perfumed, dandified style of disenchantment brought to grandeur by Proust and Nabokov."
Mitch Albom chose
The Confessions of Max Tivoli for the
Today Show Book Club, and it soon became a bestseller. The story of a man aging backwards, it was inspired by the
Bob Dylan song "
My Back Pages." It is similar in theme to the Fitzgerald
short story and the film
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Greer's fourth book,
The Story of a Marriage, was published in 2008.
The New York Times said of it: "Mr. Greer seamlessly choreographs an intricate narrative that speaks authentically to the longings and desires of his characters. All the while he never strays from the convincing and steady voice of Pearlie."
The Washington Post called it "thoughtful, complex and exquisitely written."
The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells was published in June 2013. His novel
Less was published in 2017 and received the 2018
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. A follow-up,
Less is Lost, was published in 2022 and debuted on
The New York Times Best Sellers list. ==Awards and prizes==