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Description
After a year of self-imposed exile, a young writer attends a New Year’s Eve party in hopes of reconnecting with old classmates in a blackly humorous tale set on a single snowy night
After experiencing a mysterious heart-related health scare, our narrator, Sebastian Castillo, who shares his name with this book’s author, resolves to spend a year alone in self-imposed exile, passing the time by exercising each day and watching self-improvement videos.
But come New Year’s Eve, Sebastian will break his expulsion from everyday life by accepting an invitation to the home of a former philosophy professor for a reunion with his cohort, one decade after graduating. This invitation surely would have been ignored if not for the promised attendance of Maria, Sebastian’s former classmate and love interest. What follows is an inexplicable series of fascinating events charting the erosion of young, bookish hope.
Fresh, Green Life is a meditation on literature, education, and philosophy, a trek through the past that forecasts a mediocre future, and a compact miracle of the fake-real.
After experiencing a mysterious heart-related health scare, our narrator, Sebastian Castillo, who shares his name with this book’s author, resolves to spend a year alone in self-imposed exile, passing the time by exercising each day and watching self-improvement videos.
But come New Year’s Eve, Sebastian will break his expulsion from everyday life by accepting an invitation to the home of a former philosophy professor for a reunion with his cohort, one decade after graduating. This invitation surely would have been ignored if not for the promised attendance of Maria, Sebastian’s former classmate and love interest. What follows is an inexplicable series of fascinating events charting the erosion of young, bookish hope.
Fresh, Green Life is a meditation on literature, education, and philosophy, a trek through the past that forecasts a mediocre future, and a compact miracle of the fake-real.
Product Details
| Publisher | Soft Skull |
| Publish Date | June 24, 2025 |
| Pages | 160 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Paperback / softback |
| EAN/UPC | 9781593767914 |
| Dimensions | 8.2 X 5.5 X 0.5 inches | 0.4 pounds |
About the Author
SEBASTIAN CASTILLO is a writer and teacher living in Philadelphia. He was born in Caracas, Venezuela, and grew up in New York. His work has appeared in New York Tyrant, Peach Mag, Electric Literature, Joyland, Epoch, BOMB, and elsewhere. He is the author of 49 Venezuelan Novels, Not I, SALMON, and The Zoo of Thinking.
Reviews
The Orange County Register, A Most Anticipated Book of Spring
Our Culture Magazine, A Most Anticipated Book of the Summer
"A giddy character study." —Emma Alpern, A Vulture Must Read Book of the Month
“One of the most original authors working today.” —Michael Schaub, The Orange County Register
"Fresh, Green Life is an absorbing, thoughtful exploration as to how a year of stillness can culminate in one fateful night, spurned by hubris and solitude and made relatable by Castillo’s humor and storytelling." —Sam Franzini, Hobart
"Castillo’s work is marked by a distinct and nimble experimentalism that’s only growing in its playfulness, generosity, and gravity. Fresh, Green Life is about having a mind that believes it can juke the messiness of being human, of thinking yourself smarter than your circumstances, and realizing that having an intellect isn’t the same as having a life." —Crow Jonah Norlander, BOMB
"John Ashbery would have loved Fresh, Green Life." —Lucy K. Shaw, Zona Motel
"Set throughout a single snowy night, Fresh, Green Life unleashes a series of inexplicable events that make for a hilariously unpredictable and singular novel." —Language Arts
"[A] combination of highbrow references and deadpan comedy clicks resonantly throughout the book, and admirers of Thomas Bernhard’s work will find plenty to savor here. The gulf between the narrator’s intellectual ideals and lived reality . . . gives this short novel plenty of energy. Castillo navigates an emotionally fraught narrative with empathy and dry humor." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Castillo skewers various forms of malarkey in this sharp tale of a cerebral man’s quest for self-improvement . . . The engrossing narrative explores questions about how one should lead, or change, one’s life. Fans of Thomas Bernhard will find much to love." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Fresh, Green Life demonstrates how fun misanthropy can be . . . [It] succeeds by limiting the whimsy and making the surreal elements all close enough to plausibility to replace the slack energy of a goofy daydream with the tension of everyday anxiety . . . A gift that feels incredibly generous." —Sasha Frere-Jones, Bookforum
"Castillo’s hypnotic, funny, and wonderfully surprising novel, an exemplary example of autofiction, wraps up the reader and takes them on a fascinating journey." —Booklist
"Exposing the thin lines between discipline and vanity, rigor and pretension, discourse and isolation, Fresh, Green Life is a surreal, compulsively readable portrait of a disenchanted scholar. Castillo writes with humor and humility, masterfully endearing his fictional counterpart to the reader as his hero seeks the 'delicious nonsense' of his school days and a reason to break his yearlong vow of silence. Fresh, Green Life is a disarming, absorbing, and singular novel." —Emily Adrian, author of Seduction Theory
“Our narrator in Fresh, Green Life, one ‘Sebastian Castillo,’ is a contemporary anti-hero, a descendent of Underground Man and Zama—neurotic, pretentious, and willfully lonely, a minor fraud and struggling academic, an adorably wretched idealist—who asks us, as we spend a few hours in the ‘life-world’ of his mind, to consider the gap between passivity and action, between genius and stupidity, and what it might mean to live our philosophy. A hilarious and unpredictable novel.” ––Elisa Gabbert, author of Any Person Is the Only Self
Our Culture Magazine, A Most Anticipated Book of the Summer
"A giddy character study." —Emma Alpern, A Vulture Must Read Book of the Month
“One of the most original authors working today.” —Michael Schaub, The Orange County Register
"Fresh, Green Life is an absorbing, thoughtful exploration as to how a year of stillness can culminate in one fateful night, spurned by hubris and solitude and made relatable by Castillo’s humor and storytelling." —Sam Franzini, Hobart
"Castillo’s work is marked by a distinct and nimble experimentalism that’s only growing in its playfulness, generosity, and gravity. Fresh, Green Life is about having a mind that believes it can juke the messiness of being human, of thinking yourself smarter than your circumstances, and realizing that having an intellect isn’t the same as having a life." —Crow Jonah Norlander, BOMB
"John Ashbery would have loved Fresh, Green Life." —Lucy K. Shaw, Zona Motel
"Set throughout a single snowy night, Fresh, Green Life unleashes a series of inexplicable events that make for a hilariously unpredictable and singular novel." —Language Arts
"[A] combination of highbrow references and deadpan comedy clicks resonantly throughout the book, and admirers of Thomas Bernhard’s work will find plenty to savor here. The gulf between the narrator’s intellectual ideals and lived reality . . . gives this short novel plenty of energy. Castillo navigates an emotionally fraught narrative with empathy and dry humor." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Castillo skewers various forms of malarkey in this sharp tale of a cerebral man’s quest for self-improvement . . . The engrossing narrative explores questions about how one should lead, or change, one’s life. Fans of Thomas Bernhard will find much to love." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Fresh, Green Life demonstrates how fun misanthropy can be . . . [It] succeeds by limiting the whimsy and making the surreal elements all close enough to plausibility to replace the slack energy of a goofy daydream with the tension of everyday anxiety . . . A gift that feels incredibly generous." —Sasha Frere-Jones, Bookforum
"Castillo’s hypnotic, funny, and wonderfully surprising novel, an exemplary example of autofiction, wraps up the reader and takes them on a fascinating journey." —Booklist
"Exposing the thin lines between discipline and vanity, rigor and pretension, discourse and isolation, Fresh, Green Life is a surreal, compulsively readable portrait of a disenchanted scholar. Castillo writes with humor and humility, masterfully endearing his fictional counterpart to the reader as his hero seeks the 'delicious nonsense' of his school days and a reason to break his yearlong vow of silence. Fresh, Green Life is a disarming, absorbing, and singular novel." —Emily Adrian, author of Seduction Theory
“Our narrator in Fresh, Green Life, one ‘Sebastian Castillo,’ is a contemporary anti-hero, a descendent of Underground Man and Zama—neurotic, pretentious, and willfully lonely, a minor fraud and struggling academic, an adorably wretched idealist—who asks us, as we spend a few hours in the ‘life-world’ of his mind, to consider the gap between passivity and action, between genius and stupidity, and what it might mean to live our philosophy. A hilarious and unpredictable novel.” ––Elisa Gabbert, author of Any Person Is the Only Self
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