Try free for 30 days
-
How to Read Now
- Narrated by: Elaine Castillo
- Length: 9 hrs and 4 mins
Failed to add items
Add to basket failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from Wish List failed.
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Buy Now for $23.67
No valid payment method on file.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Listeners also picked
-
Beginning Theory
- An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory: Fourth Edition
- By: Peter Barry
- Narrated by: Lucy Scott
- Length: 13 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Beginning Theory has been helping students navigate through the thickets of literary and cultural theory for over two decades. This new and expanded fourth edition continues to offer listeners the best single-volume introduction to the field. The bewildering variety of approaches, theorists and technical language is lucidly and expertly unravelled.
-
Refuse to Be Done
- How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts
- By: Matt Bell
- Narrated by: Matthew Boston
- Length: 3 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
They say writing is rewriting. So why does the second part get such short shrift? Refuse to Be Done will guide you through every step of the novel writing process, from getting started on those first pages to the last tips for making your final draft even tighter and stronger.
-
-
Brilliant
- By Kindle Customer on 22-01-2023
-
Dr. No
- A Novel
- By: Percival Everett
- Narrated by: Amir Abdullah
- Length: 6 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The protagonist of Percival Everett's puckish new novel is a brilliant professor of mathematics who goes by Wala Kitu. (Wala, he explains, means "nothing" in Tagalog, and Kitu is Swahili for "nothing.") He is an expert on nothing. That is to say, he is an expert, and his area of study is nothing, and he does nothing about it.
-
-
Great!
- By Anonymous User on 30-05-2023
-
Playing in the Dark
- Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
- Length: 3 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Morrison shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree--and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires. According to the Chicago Tribune, Morrison "reimagines and remaps the possibility of America." Her brilliant discussions of the "Africanist" presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway leads to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential characteristics of our literary tradition.
-
Craft and Conscience
- How to Write About Social Issues
- By: Kavita Das
- Narrated by: Lynnette R. Freeman
- Length: 13 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Writers are witnesses and scribes to society’s conscience but writing about social issues in the twenty-first century requires a new, sharper toolkit. Craft and Conscience helps writers weave together their narrative craft, analytical and research skills, and their conscience to create prose which makes us feel the individual and collective impact of crucial issues of our time. Kavita Das guides writers to take on nuanced perspectives and embrace intentionality through a social justice lens.
-
Bless the Blood
- A Cancer Memoir
- By: Walela Nehanda
- Narrated by: Walela Nehanda
- Length: 6 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When Walela is diagnosed at twenty-three with advanced stage blood cancer, they're suddenly thrust into the unsympathetic world of tubes and pills, doctors who don’t use their correct pronouns, and hordes of "well-meaning" but patronizing people offering unsolicited advice as they navigate rocky personal relationships and share their story online.
-
Beginning Theory
- An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory: Fourth Edition
- By: Peter Barry
- Narrated by: Lucy Scott
- Length: 13 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Beginning Theory has been helping students navigate through the thickets of literary and cultural theory for over two decades. This new and expanded fourth edition continues to offer listeners the best single-volume introduction to the field. The bewildering variety of approaches, theorists and technical language is lucidly and expertly unravelled.
-
Refuse to Be Done
- How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts
- By: Matt Bell
- Narrated by: Matthew Boston
- Length: 3 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
They say writing is rewriting. So why does the second part get such short shrift? Refuse to Be Done will guide you through every step of the novel writing process, from getting started on those first pages to the last tips for making your final draft even tighter and stronger.
-
-
Brilliant
- By Kindle Customer on 22-01-2023
-
Dr. No
- A Novel
- By: Percival Everett
- Narrated by: Amir Abdullah
- Length: 6 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The protagonist of Percival Everett's puckish new novel is a brilliant professor of mathematics who goes by Wala Kitu. (Wala, he explains, means "nothing" in Tagalog, and Kitu is Swahili for "nothing.") He is an expert on nothing. That is to say, he is an expert, and his area of study is nothing, and he does nothing about it.
-
-
Great!
- By Anonymous User on 30-05-2023
-
Playing in the Dark
- Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
- Length: 3 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Morrison shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree--and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires. According to the Chicago Tribune, Morrison "reimagines and remaps the possibility of America." Her brilliant discussions of the "Africanist" presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway leads to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential characteristics of our literary tradition.
-
Craft and Conscience
- How to Write About Social Issues
- By: Kavita Das
- Narrated by: Lynnette R. Freeman
- Length: 13 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Writers are witnesses and scribes to society’s conscience but writing about social issues in the twenty-first century requires a new, sharper toolkit. Craft and Conscience helps writers weave together their narrative craft, analytical and research skills, and their conscience to create prose which makes us feel the individual and collective impact of crucial issues of our time. Kavita Das guides writers to take on nuanced perspectives and embrace intentionality through a social justice lens.
-
Bless the Blood
- A Cancer Memoir
- By: Walela Nehanda
- Narrated by: Walela Nehanda
- Length: 6 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When Walela is diagnosed at twenty-three with advanced stage blood cancer, they're suddenly thrust into the unsympathetic world of tubes and pills, doctors who don’t use their correct pronouns, and hordes of "well-meaning" but patronizing people offering unsolicited advice as they navigate rocky personal relationships and share their story online.
Publisher's Summary
'Castillo's How To Read Now took my breath away. Energetically brilliant, warmly humane, incisively funny.'
Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less
'I gasped, shouted, and holler-laughed while reading these essays... Phenomenal'
R.O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries
How many times have we heard that reading builds empathy? That we can travel through books? How often have we were heard about the importance of diversifying our bookshelves? Or claimed that books saved our lives? These familiar words—beautiful, aspirational—are sometimes even true. But award-winning novelist Elaine Castillo has more ambitious hopes for our reading culture, and in this collection of linked essays, she moves to wrest reading away from the aspirations of uniting people in empathetic harmony and reposition it as thornier, ultimately more rewarding work.
How to Read Now explores the politics and ethics of reading, and insists that we are capable of something better: a more engaged relationship not just with our fiction and our art, but with our buried and entangled histories. Smart, funny, galvanizing, and sometimes profane, Castillo attacks the stale questions and less-than-critical proclamations that masquerade as vital discussion: reimagining the cartography of the classics, building a moral case against the settler colonialism of lauded writers like Joan Didion, taking aim at Nobel Prize winners and toppling indie filmmakers, and celebrating glorious moments in everything from popular TV like The Watchmen to the films of Wong Kar-wai and the work of contemporary poets like Tommy Pico.
At once a deeply personal and searching history of one woman's reading life, and a wide-ranging and urgent intervention into our globalized conversations about why reading matters today, How to Read Now empowers us to embrace a more complicated, embodied form of reading, inviting us to acknowledge complicated truths, ignite surprising connections, imagine a more daring solidarity, and create space for a riskier intimacy—within ourselves, and with each other.