How to Read Now: Essays

Available

Product Details

Price
$27.00  $25.11
Publisher
Viking
Publish Date
Pages
352
Dimensions
5.85 X 8.42 X 1.27 inches | 0.99 pounds
Language
English
Type
Hardcover
EAN/UPC
9780593489635

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About the Author

Elaine Castillo, named one of "30 of the Planet's Most Exciting Young People" by the Financial Times, was born and raised in the Bay Area. Her debut novel, America Is Not the Heart, was a finalist for numerous prizes including the Elle Big Book Award, the Center for Fiction Prize, and the Aspen Words Literary Prize and was named a best book of 2018 by NPR, Real Simple, Lit Hub, The Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Post, Kirkus Reviews, and the New York Public Library.

Reviews

Praise for HOW TO READ NOW

I gasped, shouted, and holler-laughed while reading these essays from the phenomenal Elaine Castillo. What powerful writing, what a rigorous mind. For as long as I live, I want to read anything Castillo writes, and you probably do, too.
--R.O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries

How To Read Now is a powerful punch in criticism's solar plexus: Castillo's take as the 'unexpected reader' is what literature needs now, both an absolute bomb and a balm--a master class in the art of reading. Her art is a corrective and a curative but also just a joy--humorous, insanely erudite, and absolutely necessary for our times.
--Gina Apostol, author of Gun Dealer's Daughter

Castillo's How To Read Now took my breath away. Energetically brilliant, warmly humane, incisively funny, it whips the tablecloth from under the setting of contemporary reading, politics and intellectual culture in a literary act of daring. It seems there is nothing Castillo can not do. Read How to Read Now now.
--Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Less

A radiant, irreverent, rigorous and revolutionary act of reading. Elaine Castillo is on fire and this book, a work of generous cultural stewardship, performs a much-needed, controlled burning.
--Olivia Sudjic, author of Asylum Road

Exciting, important and energising, HOW TO READ NOW is the book we need now: a clarion call for decentering whiteness and for a truly decolonised publishing, critical, and reading culture. It reaffirms that writers of colour are here; we are here to hold power to account; we are here to read each other and cheer for each other; we are here to stay. I am so grateful for Elaine Castillo's beautiful mind, and for this vital and moving book.
--Preti Taneja, author of We That Are Young and Aftermath

Funny, smart, brilliant, HOW TO READ NOW is a tour de force. Castillo skewers popular thought around reading, suggesting a new way forward, in sharp and incisive prose. I'll never read Didion the same way again.
--Kasim Ali, author of Good Intentions

How to Read Now is a wake-up call. A broadside. A rich and brilliant war cry. Elaine Castillo exposes the inadequacy of thinking about books as empathy machines, arguing instead for a type of reading that accepts responsibility and implication; reading as a radical act of awareness and allyship.
--Chris Power, author of A Lonely Man

Castillo's nonfiction carries the same animated verve as her novel...masterly...an engaging and provocative conversation with a playful interlocutor who wanted me, her reader, to talk back...'How to Read Now' is a book that doesn't seek to shut down the current literary discourse so much as shake it up. And on this I agree with Castillo: It so desperately needs to change.
--The New York Times Book Review

Each of the book's eight essays burns bright and hot from start to finish...clarifying and bracing...A book is nothing without a reader; this one is co-created by its recipients, re-created every time the page is turned anew. 'How to Read Now' offers its audience the opportunity to look past the simplicity we're all too often spoon-fed into order to restore ourselves to chaos and complexity -- a way of seeing and reading that demands so much more of us but offers even more in return.
--Los Angeles Times


Castillo's knowledge, along with her firebrand style and generous humor, result in a dynamic and necessary look at the state of storytelling. This one packs a powerful punch.
--Publishers Weekly

[How to Read Now] aims to remind us how provocative great writing can be.
--Chicago Tribune

Observing the classics to the contemporary (including other 'readable' media beyond books), and thinking deeply about the roles of reading in our world, Castillo urges us toward 'a more daring solidarity.'
--Lit Hub

Provocative, deeply analytical, and powerfully expressed... A deftly surgical critic... From reading Jane Austen to the fear and hatred fueling book challenges, Castillo's investigations are incisive, reorienting, sometimes funny, and truly revolutionary.
--Booklist

"In How to Read Now, Elaine Castillo brilliantly argues that being a good reader means learning how to interrogate and interpret the stories all around us ... Her voice is eviscerating, dramatic and funny as she lays out the ways that universalizing the white experience reduces writers of color to teachers of historical trauma and nonwhite cultures."
--BookPage, starred review.


Elaine Castillo's debut, America Is Not the Heart, was one of our favorite reads of 2018 and we've been eager to see what's next from her. This incisive collection of essays doesn't disappoint, tossing a bomb into our tired cultural conversations around reading and empathy to ask tougher and more urgent questions about the political potential of this beloved pastime.
--Chicago Review of Books

'How to Read Now' runs off the tongue a little easier than 'How to Dismantle Your Entire Critical Apparatus, ' writes novelist Elaine Castillo in her debut nonfiction book, but such deconstruction is what makes for smarter, stronger readers. Boundless erudition and eloquent exasperation define her essay collection, which provokes and discomfits, but ultimately engages, edifies, and thoroughly entertains.'
--Christian Science Monitor

"Critiquing the prevailing discourse about reading as a social benefit and eschewing single-minded celebration, the essays in Castillo's provocative collection reach deeper to address what we can gain from a more complicated, challenging approach to reading."
--Alta

Elaine Castillo has a big voice, one to reckon with. Whether it's her acclaimed debut novel, America is Not the Heart, or this breathtaking collection of essays, Castillo is one to watch (and read).
--Ms. Magazine

The essays are funny, intelligent, and said all the things I had been waiting for someone to say and more. I loved being in Elaine's brain, as well as her deeply humane commitment to encourage us all to step outside ourselves and see the world - and one another other - anew.
--
Rebecca Liu, The Guardian

The author of the acclaimed novel America is Not the Heart now publishes a volume of criticism, essays destined to become classics-covering the lies told about fiction and empathy, the response to what Castillo calls "unexpected reader," and the imperial and colonial ideas that undergird works of art and readings of them.
--The Millions