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7 books added
Elaine Castillo
(b.1984)Elaine Castillo was born in the San Francisco Bay Area and now lives in southeast London. She is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley and received her MA in Creative & Life Writing from Goldsmiths College, University of London, where she was shortlisted for the Pat Kavanagh Award. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, a Gatewood Prize semi-finalist, three-time winner of the Roselyn Schneider Eisner Prize for prose, and one of the 29 writers in Freeman’s, Issue Four: The Future of New Writing. Her debut novel, America Is Not the Heart, will be published by Viking (US/Canada), Atlantic (UK) and Foksal (Poland) in Spring 2018.
Genres: Historical, Literary Fiction
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Elaine Castillo recommends
Palaver (2025)
Bryan Washington
"The gift of reading Bryan Washington's tender, funny, profoundly compassionate fiction is like sinking finally into a warm bath: a prose that stirs all those sore places that have lingered unspoken in us-and then meets them with Washington's singular, achingly gentle attention, warmth, and solace. Palaver is a quiet knockout of a novel, a book like a yearning hand stretched out to the wide world (even if a car crashes into it!), and most of all a book that knows all family stories (that is, stories about all the possible definitions of family) are also love stories, complete with the heartbreak, loss and betrayal-but also the luminous hope of repair, recovery, and reconciliation."
Assembly (2021)
Natasha Brown
"Assembly feels thrillingly like the fictional companion to Jamaica Kincaid’s nonfiction masterpiece A Small Place: where A Small Place dissected British imperialism and coloniality as manifested in Antigua, Brown turns that keen, forensic gaze back to England’s own green and not so pleasant Land, filleting through its mores and pulling back its veneer of civility with the steady, sure hand of a surgeon. A book like a finely honed scalpel—marking a new and electrifying dawn for the essay novel."
Bestiary (2020)
K-Ming Chang
"Bestiary is crafted at the scale of epic poetry: origin stories that feel at once gravely older than their years, yet viscerally contemporary. Chang knows well that the life of a family—marriage, immigration, queer coming-of-age—can so often feel like a wild and tender myth, being spun and unspun by its members, again and again. These are fables I wish I’d had growing up."
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