"Literature shouldn't be politicized." "Separate the art from the artist." "Books build empathy." These are very silly and simplistic ideas, and Elaine Castillo would like to encourage you to shed them.
After achieving success with her breakthrough debut novel ;"America Is Not the Heart," Castillo found herself traveling the world, engaging with audiences and writers, and as she puts it, "thinking about how to read." Not in the simplistic, reading group guide way. Definitely not, as she says, to "Make better white people." Instead, she understood that "The way we read now is simply not good enough," and that this not good enough reading applies to everything — "films, TV shows, our history, each other." So she is not going to fix you or tell you what books to put on your shelf to offer the appearance of being sufficiently progressive. Instead, with her new book of essays, "How to Read Now," she's going to explain why comfortable obliviousness makes for bad critical thinking. "I can't say I love this world or living in it if I don't other to know it," she writes, "indeed, be known by it."
