Soft Skull Press

Fresh, Green Life - Sebastian Castillo

After resigning from an adjunct teaching position, our narrator Sebastian Castillo, who shares a name with our author, Sebastian Castillo, and also with a translated Spanish writer, Sebastian Castillo, resolves to spend an entire year without speaking, passing the time by exercising each day and watching self-improvement videos. But, come New Year''s Eve, Sebastian (the narrator) - whose rich interiority in precontemplation alone is curiously and addictively easy to read - will break his silence by accepting an invitation to the home of a former professor for a reunion amongst 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, male hope. In conversation with Rilke, Descartes, Kant, Deleuze, Derrida, Lacan, and others, Fresh, Green Life is a meditation on literature, academia, and philosophy; a trek through the past that forecasts a mediocre future; and a compact miracle of the fake-real.

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