How to Read Now: Essays Audiobook

Quotes

• 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.

• "Each of the book’s eight essays burns bright and hot from start to finish…clarifying and bracing…A book is nothing without a reader; this one is co-created by its recipients, re-created every time the page is turned anew. ‘How to Read Now’ offers 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"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.

• "The author of the acclaimed novel America is Not the Heart now publishes a volume of criticism, essays destined to become classics–covering the lies told about fiction and empathy, the response to what Castillo calls 'unexpected reader,' and the imperial and colonial ideas that undergird works of art and readings of them.

  — The Millions"How to Read Now is at once a fierce condemnation of American reading culture, which Castillo rightly sees as racist and consumerist, and a fervent ode to reading’s potential…Although How to Read Now is technically about reading, it doubles as a work of refreshingly blunt literary criticism. Its essays are so thoroughly linked by their worldview that the book often feels less like a collection than a single, impassioned argument on behalf not only of thoughtful, ethical reading, but also of fiction designed to be thoughtfully, ethically read… Castillo’s arguments on behalf of unexpected reading are, therefore, not only striking but vital. How to Read Now compels us to dispel any incurious approach to both books and the world.

• "Once in a while, a book comes along that lands like a well-timed shake of your shoulders, a persuasive, invigorating invitation to try harder and do better. That's exactly what Elaine Castillo's 'How to Read Now,' the most entertaining case for critical thinking I've enjoyed in ages, feels like…The highest praise I can give of Castillo's book is that it truly has changed how I read now.

  — Salon"Pushing beyond familiar platitudes about reading’s capacity to build empathy, How to Read Now interrogates the ethics of consuming popular culture, urging us to reimagine the possibilities for what reading can be.

• "In this collection of sharp and stirring essays, Elaine Castillo interrogates today’s reading culture and the certain aspects of it that tend to be performative and hollow. Instead, she urges, we should strive to really reconstruct the way we develop relationships with the art and fiction we consume, more fully recognizing the ethical and political ramifications and engaging with it far more deeply.

  — Book Riot