Elaine Castillo
Named one of “30 of the Planet’s Most Exciting Young People” by the Financial Times, Elaine Castillo was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her most recent novel, MODERATION, is currently longlisted for the 2026 Women’s Prize in Fiction, and was named one of the Top Ten Books of 2025 by The Atlantic, Slate, and a Best Book of 2025 by The New Yorker, Time Magazine, Kirkus Reviews, and more. She is also the author of the award-winning debut novel America is Not the Heart, the acclaimed book of essays How to Read Now, and the longform essay on animal rescue and training, “Good Girl: Notes on Dog Rescue.” She is a two-time San Francisco Public Library Laureate, a Berkeley Public Library Laureate, and was also recently longlisted for the 2026 Joyce Carol Oates Prize. In the tradition of diasporic mothers everywhere, she works primarily so her rescue German shepherd Vincent can live a better life.
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Moderation, A Novel
Girlie was, by every conceivable metric, one
of the very best. All the chaff, long ago
burned up by unquenchable fire: the ones who
had hourly panic attacks, the ones who took
up drinking; the ones who fucked in the
stairwells during break time, the ones who
started bringing handguns to the office, the
ones who started believing the Holocaust had
never happened, or that 9/11 was an inside
job, or that no one had ever been to the
moon at all, or that every presidential
candidate was picked by a cosmic society of
devils who communicated across
interplanetary channels; the ones who took
the work home, the ones who never came back
the same, or never came back at all. The
floor was now averaging only three or four
suicide attempts a year, down from one or
two a month. The ones who remained, like
her, were the wheat: the exemplars, tested
paladins, the ones who didn’t throw up in
the hallway and leave the vomit there.
They’d been, to continue speaking of it
biblically, separated.
From MODERATION by Elaine Castillo, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
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Moderation, A Novel
As for why so many of them were Filipino—
well, what was there to say that hadn’t been
said in 1765; in 1899; in 1946; in 1965? The
bootstraps way of putting it was to say they
excelled, frankly, in the manner of people
who had been formed to excel in these very
specific theaters: because they spoke and
read good English, because they respected
chains of command, because they kept a
positive attitude, because they would take a
fifth of an American worker’s pay, and most
of all: because they were familiar. They knew
Americans; what they liked, what they didn’t,
the ditties they sang, the food they ate,
what they looked like when they were horny,
what they looked like when they were dying,
the psalms that struck their hearts, the way
their women set their curls, the shift of air
around a man before his fist hit flesh, the
hours of night when God was least visible.
There was no other country in the world, no
other people in the world, better suited to
the content moderation of America. And from
America, to the world. Ad astra, et cetera.
From MODERATION by Elaine Castillo, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
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In her fiction and essays, Elaine Castillo deftly translates worlds into words and words into worlds. Her work is brave and demanding, grounding our sense of present and future. Her sharp observations make us laugh, make us question and regret, and offer a delicious modern critique of unhinged times.