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. Kirkus Reviews , A Best Fiction Book of the Year The Orange County Register , A Most Anticipated Book of Spring Our Culture Magazine , A Most Anticipated Book of the Summer "[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 " Fresh, Green Life is an absorbing, thoughtful exploration as to how a year of stillness can culminate in one fateful night, spurned by hubris and solitude and made relatable by Castillo’s humor and storytelling." —Sam Franzini, Hobart "Castillo’s work is marked by a distinct and nimble experimentalism that’s only growing in its playfulness, generosity, and gravity. Fresh, Green Life is about having a mind that believes it can juke the messiness of being human, of thinking yourself smarter than your circumstances, and realizing that having an intellect isn’t the same as having a life." —Crow Jonah Norlander, BOMB "John Ashbery would have loved Fresh, Green Life ." —Lucy K. Shaw, Zona Motel "Set throughout a single snowy night, Fresh, Green Life unleashes a series of inexplicable events that make for a hilariously unpredictable and singular novel." — Language Arts "The novel . . . maintains a calm tone throughout that belies something more manic. The effect is like listening to a smart friend over a drink, laughing at his sly and witty remarks only to find oneself wondering at their content on the walk home later with growing alarm. All of his erudition masks a psyche teetering on a knife’s edge, ready to fall at a gentle breeze." —Theodore Sovinski, Cleveland Review of Books " Fresh, Green Life is almost unbearably good at satirizing the philosophy-guzzling, self-improvement-obsessed sensitive young man. However, the book’s second half takes an unexpected turn from the first’s manic monologue that I found satisfying—and maybe even touching? The slim novel is worth picking up if nothing else for the chance to see the word tatterdemalion in print." —Liam Archacki, The Paris Review "[A] combination of highbrow references and deadpan comedy clicks resonantly throughout the book, and admirers of Thomas Bernhard’s work will find plenty to savor here. The gulf between the narrator’s intellectual ideals and lived reality . . . gives this short novel plenty of energy. Castillo navigates an emotionally fraught narrative with empathy and dry humor." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "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) " Fresh, Green Life demonstrates how fun misanthropy can be . . . [It] succeeds by limiting the whimsy and making the surreal elements all close enough to plausibility to replace the slack energy of a goofy daydream with the tension of everyday anxiety . . . A gift that feels incredibly generous." —Sasha Frere-Jones, Bookforum "Castillo’s hypnotic, funny, and wonderfully surprising novel, an exemplary example of autofiction, wraps up the reader and takes them on a fascinating journey." — Booklist "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