Elaine Castillo’s How to Read Now begins with a section called 'Author’s Note, or a Virgo Clarifies Things.' The title is a neat encapsulation of the book’s style: rigorous but still chatty, intellectual but not precious or academic about it.

... an even more explicit meditation on questions of inheritance, working through Castillo’s responsibilities not as a writer, but as a reader. Its eight chapters engage the readers who have most informed her own practice.

Elaine Castillo dismantles the notion that art should be separate from the artist, because our understanding of where a story comes from, and who is telling it, matters.

... bracing.

Castillo is too shrewd a critic of identity politics to fall prey to such traps of liberal multiculturalism.

... bracing, informed, and often funny.

Provocative, deeply analytical, and powerfully expressed.

In critical essays that examine everything from fantasy novels to award-winning classic literature, Castillo outlines the limitations of America's reading culture. Her voice is eviscerating, dramatic and funny as she lays out the ways that universalizing the white experience reduces writers of color to teachers of historical trauma and nonwhite cultures.

Brilliant and passionate.

Not just thoroughly researched, these essays are also wildly engaging, with a biting and appropriately scathing tone and plenty of humor. Refreshingly, the humor never distracts from the urgency of the prose or incisiveness of the analysis.

Boundless erudition and eloquent exasperation define Elaine Castillo’s debut nonfiction, How to Read Now, an incandescent collection of essays that provokes and discomfits, but ultimately engages, edifies, and thoroughly entertains.