Not I

In this imaginative hybrid of fiction? poetry? autobiography? we are brought into the mind of Sebastian, who narrates a continual stream of thoughts, dreams, regrets, and memories. As the book progresses, a larger picture comes into focus. It’s a stunning cumulative effect. Strange, funny, and moving. In Not I, we miraculously get it all: a gleeful dismantling of literary expectation, a story of a life, and a dive into the mind of an artist in the world.

Available from Word West.

Praise for Not I

“Sebastian Castillo’s writing is surprising, charming, and formally innovative. The fascinating narrator of Not I is someone who tells your secrets, orders ten-course meals, and finds the ‘uselessness in treasure’—I didn’t want this book to end.”

— Chelsea Hodson, author of Tonight I’m Someone Else.

“Taut as a whistle, procedural as a wildflower, charming as Garbo, Sebastian Castillo’s Not I is unconditionally the perfect antidote to any confessional hangover. In the tradition of Anne Carson, Aaron Kunin, Édouard Levé, and other scholars of the rudimentary and the rearranged, Castillo works magic with reduced means. He makes literature seem a sustainable and attainable practice, as marvelous as basic grammar or tap water. Not I manages to find comedy within renunciation, and pathos within a strangely winnowed opulence, like a stick figure performing a complicated fugal dance in an emptied theater.”

— Wayne Koestenbaum, author of Figure It Out

Read an interview with Nick Farriella for Hobart