'A highly charged, passionate and tender love story. Wonderful'
Kaliane Bradley, author of The Ministry of Time
'Castillo is a literary firecracker... If you liked Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, you'll like this'
Pandora Sykes, Books and Bits
Thirty-something Girlie Delmundo works a day job as a content moderator, flagging and removing the very worst that makes it on to the internet. She's one of the best at it, too - dispassionate, unflinching, maybe because she learned by necessity to wall off all her emotions when she was still a kid - so it's no surprise to anyone when the social-media company for which she works offers her a big salary rise and an office to start moderating its new venture: virtual-reality theme parks, lush and near-perfect simulations of civilizations long since dead.
Girlie takes the job, and getting paid to spend her days wandering the crowds of medieval jousts or exploring romantic Left Bank Paris seems too good to be true. Almost. Sure, she signed up for having to deal with the sordidness of pretty much any virtual space, but as she begins to explore the intricate worlds that she moderates, she notices two deeply troubling things: that there might be something much darker built into the very code of the company, and that William, technically her new boss, a man whose barriers are as mighty as her own, might just be that long-forgotten thing... Girlie's type.
'A wake-up call. A broadside. A rich and brilliant war cry' Chris Power
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.
Quand elle arrive dans la baie de San Francisco après a voir fui les Philippines, son pays natal, Hero refuse d'e voquer ce qui lui est arrivé. Au coeur de la Californie, c'est toute une communauté d'expatriés qui va l'accueillir : jeunes adultes, enfants, employés de restaurants, salons de beauté, qui se sentent ni tout à fait américains, ni tout à fait philippins. Parmi eux, Hero tombe amoureuse de Rosalyn, et son passe resurgit malgre elle...
Entre La Vie bre ve et merveilleuse d'Oscar Wao de Junot Diaz et les Chroniques de San Francisco d'Armistead Maupin, Nos coeurs si loin est un premier roman lumineux et profond sur l'amour sous toutes ses formes, sur les exactions d'un régime politique et le pouvoir salvateur des communautés - de sang ou de coeur.
Debut Als Vera in Amerika ankommt, von ihren Eltern verstossten, ist es bereits ihr 3. Neuanfang. Sie erhält von ihrem Onkel eine Chance neu anzufangen. Dies ist für sie aber alles andere als einfach. Punkiges Mädchen meets real life.
Autorin: San Francisco geboren, lebt nun in London
Sometimes people just...click.
'A highly charged, passionate and tender love story. Wonderful'
Kaliane Bradley, author of The Ministry of Time
'Castillo is a literary firecracker... If you liked Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, you'll like this'
Pandora Sykes, Books and Bits
Thirty-something Girlie Delmundo works a day job as a content moderator, flagging and removing the very worst that makes it on to the internet. She's one of the best at it, too - dispassionate, unflinching, maybe because she learned by necessity to wall off all her emotions when she was still a kid - so it's no surprise to anyone when the social-media company for which she works offers her a big salary rise and an office to start moderating its new venture: virtual-reality theme parks, lush and near-perfect simulations of civilizations long since dead.
Girlie takes the job, and getting paid to spend her days wandering the crowds of medieval jousts or exploring romantic Left Bank Paris seems too good to be true. Almost. Sure, she signed up for having to deal with the sordidness of pretty much any virtual space, but as she begins to explore the intricate worlds that she moderates, she notices two deeply troubling things: that there might be something much darker built into the very code of the company, and that William, technically her new boss, a man whose barriers are as mighty as her own, might just be that long-forgotten thing... Girlie's type.
