Fresh, Green Life: A Novel by Sebastian Castillo

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.

REVIEWS

"[Castillo] is such a virtuosic writer, fine-tuning words and sentences to produce an array of potent emotional and intellectual effects . . . Without breaking a sweat, he ably inhabits and parodies alt-lit, autofiction, social media, the campus novel and the splenetic rant. He puts his fellow chroniclers of contemporary masculine panic to shame." —Robert Rubsam, The Washington Post

"A giddy character study." —Emma Alpern, A Vulture Must Read Book of the Month

“One of the most original authors working today.” —Michael Schaub, The Orange County Register