"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."

Praise

“Daniel Peña liberates us from the false trap spectacles of pain with a simple message: Witnessing is not enough. By bike, plane, foot and with a brilliant eye, he takes readers on a tour of our benighted Americas. These magnificent essays do what is so difficult and necessary to do: They enlarge the frame. Here are the deported back home in Mexico, here are clues to the long history of how we got here. And here is the author himself wrestling mightily with his own freedom, his own joy, his own sorrow.”—John Freeman, author of California Rewritten

“Braiding journalism, cultural criticism, and memoir, the essays in this book look at the extreme tolerance of human rights abuses against migrants from Latin America and elsewhere.”—Chicago Review of Books

“Apt that How to Look Away is set in the typeface Dante, because Daniel Peña is the Virgil we need right now. In blistering essay after essay, he safely guides us through the many circles of American cruelty until we emerge on the other side. With Joan Didion’s ear and Ryszard Kapuściński’s eye, this lyrical and luminous book is destined to become a classic.”—Tomás Q. Morín, author of Cat Love

“In the future, when people ask what the hell happened in North America in the first quarter of the twentieth century, they should reach for a copy of Daniel Peña’s How to Look Away. In gorgeously written essays on topics like ICE’s degradation rituals, the curious downstream effects of having a drug-cartel killer in the family, or the meaning of the Mexican deportee on both sides of the border, Peña dismantles the engines of the white gaze.”—Carla Power, two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and author of The Lady Imam

“Sharp, thrilling, and strange in the best possible way, Daniel Peña’s How to Look Away is a profound and fiercely contemporary collection. From bicycling at night in Berlin amid a global pandemic to the black-market stalls of Mexico City to the corruption, rhetoric, and noxious climate of our current cultural landscape, Peña’s essays are like bolts of lightning, dangerous and illuminating.”—Mark Haber, author of Lesser Ruins

“A powerful, thoughtful rant against the monstrous innocence of twenty-first-century America.”—Ed Morales, author of Fantasy Island and Latinx

“Pushcart Prize winner Peña interrogates Americans’ simultaneous attraction to and denial of violence, especially against people of color, in this penetrating essay collection. The book was initially inspired by a question raised on a podcast with BBC journalist Allan Little: ‘What differentiates viewer from voyeur?’ The author navigates that tension by relaying vivid, impressionistic descriptions of his travels and encounters in the U.S. and Mexico while still refusing to provide voyeuristic depictions of violence against brown people. . . . It’s a searing meditation on citizenship, white supremacy, and precarity in America today.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review