Book 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.
Praise For This Book
The Orange County Register, A Most Anticipated Book of Spring“One of the most original authors working today.” —Michael Schaub, The Orange County Register
"Castillo skewers various forms of malarkey in this sharp tale of a cerebral man’s quest for self-improvement . . . The engrossing narrative explores questions about how one should lead, or change, one’s life. Fans of Thomas Bernhard will find much to love." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Exposing the thin lines between discipline and vanity, rigor and pretension, discourse and isolation, Fresh, Green Life is a surreal, compulsively readable portrait of a disenchanted scholar. Castillo writes with humor and humility, masterfully endearing his fictional counterpart to the reader as his hero seeks the 'delicious nonsense' of his school days and a reason to break his yearlong vow of silence. Fresh, Green Life is a disarming, absorbing, and singular novel." —Emily Adrian, author of Seduction Theory
“Our narrator in Fresh, Green Life, one ‘Sebastian Castillo,’ is a contemporary anti-hero, a descendent of Underground Man and Zama—neurotic, pretentious, and willfully lonely, a minor fraud and struggling academic, an adorably wretched idealist—who asks us, as we spend a few hours in the ‘life-world’ of his mind, to consider the gap between passivity and action, between genius and stupidity, and what it might mean to live our philosophy. A hilarious and unpredictable novel.” ––Elisa Gabbert, author of Any Person Is the Only Self
