Dostoevsky on Guadalupe Street (PDF)

Dostoevsky on Guadalupe Street is a riveting collection of short essays on the impact of world literature-and Fyodor Dostoevsky in particular-on a young Latino growing up in Texas. For a searching mind attempting to find links and meanings in a dark world of fragmentation and despair, literary escape can be vitally significant. Grouped into short categories (from formative beginnings to politics and dystopia), these essays provide a historic glimpse into a nascent group of Latino writers emerging from obscurity to form one of America's newest voices. Latino writing is the fastest growing genre worldwide, and this excellent primer provides a quick study for undergraduates, graduates, and first-generation college students in journalism, education, literary studies, and the humanities. The essays are short, original, witty, and provocative-and easy to read.

"Written in lucid, luminous, and engaging prose. Dostoevsky on Guadalupe Street is a surprising, probing, edifying tour-de-force that captures literary journalism at its quintessential best. A much-needed critical discourse on the status of literature in our changing society."

-Maria Martha Brummell, Emerita, Associate Dean, Yale University; CEO of Catch the Next, Inc. (New Haven, CT)

"In one of the piquant prose morsels that constitute Dostoevsky on Guadalupe Street, Rafael Castillo, an ardent aficionado of metaphor, notes that writing is for him 'a roller coaster to self-discovery.' Jouncing through topics including education, punctuation, translation, digitalization, and growing up on the West Side of San Antonio, exhilarated readers will also find themselves."

-Steven G. Kellman, Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Texas at San Antonio; Author of Rambling Prose, The Translingual Imagination, and Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth, Among Other Books

"When you open Dostoevsky on Guadalupe Street, you will enter a world where imagination rules. You will not read this volume; you will inhabit it. Rafael Castillo possesses the two most important traits of a talented writer-a fierce intelligence and the grace with which to express it."

-Robert Seltzer, Former Editorial Writer for the San Antonio Express-News; Author of Amado Muro and Me: A Tale of Honesty and Deception

"Rafael Castillo takes us back to his youth growing up in San Antonio's Westside, where books opened his world. Castillo's beautiful, captivating words and colorful images in Dostoevsky on Guadalupe Street bring to life la raza del Westside, who for too long were marginalized and left in the shadows. This is must-reading!"

-Rogelio Saenz, Peter Flawn Professor of Geography, University of Texas at San Antonio; Author of Latinos in the United States: Diversity and Change and Opinion Writer for Latino Rebels and the New York Times

"Rafael Castillo has the concentrated power of a razor-sharp miniaturist who captures the nuance and cadence of West Side San Antonio with ease and patience of one who has observed a world through ease, mystery, and grace."

-Belinda Urdiales, Novelist and Writer with Aztlan Associates; Author of The Hidden Voice

"Dostoevsky on Guadalupe Street is a compilation of essays, review, articles and op-eds that capture the life of Latinos in the Southwest with literary style and panache."

-Julian S. Garcia, Former Editor with ViAztlan: International Journal of Arts and Ideas; Author of La Fantasica Curandera