Fresh, Green Life
A Novel
Published on 24. June 2025
160 pages
978-1-59376-792-1 (ISBN)
Description
After a year of self-imposed exile, a young writer attends a New Year's Eve party in hopes of reconnecting with old classmates in a blackly humorous tale set on a single snowy night
After experiencing a mysterious heart-related health scare, our narrator, Sebastian Castillo, who shares his name with this book's author, resolves to spend a year alone in self-imposed exile, passing the time by exercising each day and watching self-improvement videos.
But come New Year's Eve, Sebastian will break his expulsion from everyday life by accepting an invitation to the home of a former philosophy professor for a reunion with his cohort, one decade after graduating. This invitation surely would have been ignored if not for the promised attendance of Maria, Sebastian's former classmate and love interest. What follows is an inexplicable series of fascinating events charting the erosion of young, bookish hope.
Fresh, Green Life is a meditation on literature, education, and philosophy, a trek through the past that forecasts a mediocre future, and a compact miracle of the fake-real.
After experiencing a mysterious heart-related health scare, our narrator, Sebastian Castillo, who shares his name with this book's author, resolves to spend a year alone in self-imposed exile, passing the time by exercising each day and watching self-improvement videos.
But come New Year's Eve, Sebastian will break his expulsion from everyday life by accepting an invitation to the home of a former philosophy professor for a reunion with his cohort, one decade after graduating. This invitation surely would have been ignored if not for the promised attendance of Maria, Sebastian's former classmate and love interest. What follows is an inexplicable series of fascinating events charting the erosion of young, bookish hope.
Fresh, Green Life is a meditation on literature, education, and philosophy, a trek through the past that forecasts a mediocre future, and a compact miracle of the fake-real.
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SEBASTIAN CASTILLO is a writer and teacher living in Philadelphia. He was born in Caracas, Venezuela, and grew up in New York. His work has appeared in New York Tyrant, Peach Mag, Electric Literature, Joyland, Epoch, BOMB, and elsewhere. He is the author of 49 Venezuelan Novels, Not I, SALMON, and The Zoo of Thinking.
