Fresh, Green Life

Kirkus Reviews, A Best Fiction Book of the Year
The Orange County Register, A Most Anticipated Book of Spring
Our Culture Magazine, A Most Anticipated Book of the Summer

“[Castillo] is such a virtuosic writer, fine-tuning words and sentences to produce an array of potent emotional and intellectual effects . . . Without breaking a sweat, he ably inhabits and parodies alt-lit, autofiction, social media, the campus novel and the splenetic rant. He puts his fellow chroniclers of contemporary masculine panic to shame.” —Robert Rubsam, The Washington Post

“One of the most original authors working today.” —Michael Schaub, The Orange County Register

“A giddy character study.” —Emma Alpern, A Vulture Must Read Book of the Month

“Fresh, Green Life is a darkly funny and occasionally poignant novel about the perils of ‘the life of the mind.'” —Jacobin

“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

“The novel . . . maintains a calm tone throughout that belies something more manic. The effect is like listening to a smart friend over a drink, laughing at his sly and witty remarks only to find oneself wondering at their content on the walk home later with growing alarm. All of his erudition masks a psyche teetering on a knife’s edge, ready to fall at a gentle breeze.” —Theodore Sovinski, Cleveland Review of Books

“Fresh, Green Life is almost unbearably good at satirizing the philosophy-guzzling, self-improvement-obsessed sensitive young man. However, the book’s second half takes an unexpected turn from the first’s manic monologue that I found satisfying—and maybe even touching? The slim novel is worth picking up if nothing else for the chance to see the word tatterdemalion in print.” —Liam Archacki, The Paris Review

“[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