Daniel Peña Author Event - HOW TO LOOK AWAY

Join us at Lark & Owl Booksellers to hear Daniel Peña talk about their newest book, HOW TO LOOK AWAY: ON AMERICAN CRUELTY AND THE REFUSAL TO LOOK AWAY.

Check in to this event will start at 6:30pm.

ABOUT THE BOOK: A riveting, kaleidoscopic portrait of the American compulsion toward cruelty and our power to subvert it from an award-winning contributor to the Guardian and the New York Times.

In How to Look Away, Daniel Peña explores how fringe elements of his Texas childhood—AM radio, conspiracy theories, Post-Cold War paranoia—came to dominate the American political discourse and contributed to our extreme tolerance of human rights abuses against migrants from Latin America and elsewhere. He asks: What compels us to look away from these abuses? And how do we wake ourselves into action?

These evocative essays braid journalism, cultural criticism, and memoir, roaming from the vestigial Comanche War battlefields of his native Austin, to the black markets of Mexico City, to the home of a cartel hitman’s family doomed to live in the unglamorous aftermath of his crimes. Writing from both Mexico and the United States, Daniel Peña reflects on two childhood fears: demons and the death penalty. Or the answer to the question, “Do you ever really belong to yourself?” A question that serves as the looking glass through which Peña meditates on American citizenship and the kinds of people we are willing to disappear in the name of the American project. 

Channeling the swashbuckling criticism of Tom Wolfe and Anthony Bourdain and the poetic prose of Latin America's cronista movement, How to Look Away conjures hope even as it offers a haunting account of the strange bond between two nations, this American moment, and the land upon which our bodies stand.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Daniel Peña is a Pushcart Prize-winning writer and Associate professor of creative writing. Formerly, he was based out of the UNAM in Mexico City where he worked as a Fulbright-Garcia Robles Scholar. A graduate of Cornell University and a former Picador guest professor in Leipzig, Germany, his writing has appeared in Ploughshares, Texas Monthly, NBC News, and The New York Times Magazine, among other venues. He’s currently a regular contributor to The Guardian. He lives in Dallas.