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 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
