How to Read Now by Elaine Castillo

How to Read Now by Elaine Castillo

How to Read Now explores the politics and ethics of reading, and insists that we are capable of something better: a more engaged relationship not just with our fiction and our art, but with our buried and entangled histories.

A book that doesn't seek to shut down the current literary discourse so much as shake it up. (The New York Times Book Review) Offering 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)

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 many times have we heard that reading builds empathy? That we can travel through books? How often have we were heard about the importance of diversifying our bookshelves? Or claimed that books saved our lives? These familiar words--beautiful, aspirational--are sometimes even true. But award-winning novelist Elaine Castillo has more ambitious hopes for our reading culture, and in this collection of linked essays, she moves to wrest reading away from the cotton-candy aspirations of uniting people in empathetic harmony and reposition it as thornier, ultimately more rewarding work. (Vulture)

How to Read Now explores the politics and ethics of reading, and insists that we are capable of something better: a more engaged relationship not just with our fiction and our art, but with our buried and entangled histories. Smart, funny, galvanizing, and sometimes profane, Castillo attacks the stale questions and less-than-critical proclamations that masquerade as vital discussion: reimagining the cartography of the classics, building a moral case against the settler colonialism of lauded writers like Joan Didion, taking aim at Nobel Prize winners and toppling indie filmmakers, and celebrating glorious moments in everything from popular TV like The Watchmen to the films of Wong Kar-wai and the work of contemporary poets like Tommy Pico.

At once a deeply personal and searching history of one woman's reading life, and a wide-ranging and urgent intervention into our globalized conversations about why reading matters today, How to Read Now empowers us to embrace a more complicated, embodied form of reading, inviting us to acknowledge complicated truths, ignite surprising connections, imagine a more daring solidarity, and create space for a riskier intimacy--within ourselves, and with each other.

Elaine Castillo was born in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley. America Is Not the Heart is her first novel.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780593489635
ISBN 10	0593489632
Title	How to Read Now
Author	Elaine Castillo
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Penguin Putnam Inc
Year published	2022-07-26
Number of pages	352
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.