How to Look Away: On American Cruelty and the Refusal to Disappear by Daniel Peña (Hardcover) (PREORDER)

Nonfiction - Literary Collections - Essays - History - Latin America - Mexico - Social Science - Cultural & Ethnic Studies - Hispanic & Latino Studies - Political Science - Essays

RELEASE DATE: 10/6/2026 (WILL SHIP DIRECTLY FROM OUR SUPPLIER'S WAREHOUSE) 

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.

How to Look Away conjures disquiet and longing beside clarity and hope as it offers a haunting account of the strange bond between two nations, this American moment, and the land upon which our bodies stand.

AUTHOR BIO: 

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.

Review Quotes:
"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

"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. His frontline dispatches are so skillfully reported, told with such wit and verve, that they make the ugly truths exposed feel nearly palatable. Peña is such a gifted writer that he makes it impossible to tear oneself away from the people he writes about, or the prose that makes them live on the page." --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

"The digital age has placed us into silos, often banal cocoons of consciousness designed to keep us from interacting with our rapidly destabilizing world. The bitingly perceptive essays Daniel Peña gathers in this collection are a wake-up call, daring us not to look away. As he glides between Texas and Mexico City, he aims to deliver us from the long pandemic hangover and 'debasement rituals' that haunt us as we await a new world struggling to be born. . . . A powerful, thoughtful rant against the monstrous innocence of twenty-first-century America." --Ed Morales, author of Fantasy Island and Latinx