How to Read Now

Reviews / Votes

Masterly... A book that doesn't seek to shut down the current literary discourse so much as shake it up * New York Times * Each of the book's eight essays burns bright and hot from start to finish... It's a way of seeing and reading that demands so much more of us but offers even more in return * Los Angeles Times * Laser-sharp and devastating... A wake-up call * San Francisco Chronicle * Essays destined to become classics * The Millions * Tosses a bomb into our tired cultural conversations around reading and empathy to ask tougher and more urgent questions * Chicago Review of Books * Blazingly fearless... Castillo is hugely talented * Observer * 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 * 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 * 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 * 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 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 * 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 * I cannot say enough about Elaine Castillo's How to Read Now... Check it out * Roxane Gay, on Twitter * A red-hot grenade... One of my favourite books of the year * Jia Tolentino, on Instagram *