Junot Díaz’s fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Best American Short Stories. His highly-anticipated first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, was greeted with rapturous reviews, including Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times calling it “a book that decisively establishes him as one of contemporary fiction's most distinctive and irresistible new voices.” His debut story collection, Drown, published eleven years prior to Oscar Wao, was also met with unprecedented acclaim; it became a national bestseller, won numerous awards, and has since grown into a landmark of contemporary literature. Born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey, Díaz lives in New York City and is a professor of creative writing at MIT.
"An extraordinarily vibrant book that's fueled by
adrenaline-powered prose. . . A book that decisively
establishes [Díaz] as one of contemporary fiction's most
distinctive and irresistible new voices." —Michiko Kakutani,
The New York Times
"Díaz finds a miraculous balance. He cuts his barn-burning
comic-book plots (escape, ruin, redemption) with honest, messy
realism, and his narrator speaks in a dazzling hash of Spanish,
English, slang, literary flourishes, and pure virginal
dorkiness." —New York Magazine
"Genius. . . a story of the American experience that is
giddily glorious and hauntingly horrific. And what a voice Yunior
has. His narration is a triumph of style and wit, moving along
Oscar de Leon's story with cracking, down-low humor, and at times
expertly stunning us with heart-stabbing sentences.
That Díaz's novel is also full of ideas, that [the narrator's]
brilliant talking rivals the monologues of Roth's Zuckerman—in
short, that what he has produced is a kick-ass (and truly, that is
just the word for it) work of modern fiction—all make The Brief
Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao something exceedingly rare: a book
in which a new America can recognize itself, but so can everyone
else." —San Francisco Chronicle
"Astoundingly great. . . Díaz has written. . . a
mixture of straight-up English, Dominican Spanish, and hieratic
nerdspeak crowded with references to Tolkien, DC Comics,
role-playing games, and classic science fiction. . . In lesser
hands Oscar Wao would merely have been the saddest book of the
year. With Díaz on the mike, it's also the
funniest." —Time
"Superb, deliciously casual and vibrant, shot through with wit and
insight. The great achievement of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar
Wao is Díaz's ability to balance an intimate
multigenerational story of familial tragedy. . . The past and
present remain equally in focus, equally immediate, and Díaz's
acrobatic prose toggles artfully between realities, keeping us
enthralled with all." —The Boston Globe
"Panoramic and yet achingly personal. It's impossible to
categorize, which is a good thing. There's the epic novel, the
domestic novel, the social novel, the historical novel, and the
'language' novel. People talk about the Great American Novel and
the immigrant novel. Pretty reductive. Díaz's novel is a hell
of a book. It doesn't care about categories. It's densely
populated; it's obsessed with language. It's Dominican and
American, not about immigration but diaspora, in which one family's
dramas are entwined with a nation's, not about history as
information but as dark-force destroyer. Really, it's a love novel.
. . His dazzling wordplay is impressive. But by the end, it is
his tenderness and loyalty and melancholy that breaks the heart.
That is wondrous in itself." —Los Angeles Times
"Díaz's writing is unruly, manic, seductive. .
. In Díaz's landscape we are all the same, victims of a
history and a present that doesn't just bleed together but stew.
Often in hilarity. Mostly in heartbreak." —Esquire
"The Dominican Republic [Díaz] portrays in The Brief Wondrous Life
of Oscar Wao is a wild, beautiful, dangerous, and
contradictory place, both hopelessly impoverished and impossibly
rich. Not so different, perhaps, from anyone else's ancestral
homeland, but Díaz's weirdly wonderful novel illustrates the
island's uniquely powerful hold on Dominicans wherever they may
wander. Díaz made us wait eleven years for this first novel
and boom!—it's over just like that. It's not a bad gambit, to
always leave your audience wanting more. So brief and wondrous,
this life of Oscar. Wow." —The Washington Post Book World
"Terrific. . . High-energy. . . It is a joy to read, and
every bit as exhilarating to reread." —Entertainment Weekly
"Now that Díaz's second book, a novel called The Brief
Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, has finally arrived, younger writers
will find that the bar. And some older writers—we know who we
are—might want to think about stepping up their game. Oscar Wao
shows a novelist engaged with the culture, high and low, and its
polyglot language. If Donald Barthelme had lived to read Díaz, he
surely would have been delighted to discover an intellectual and
linguistic omnivore who could have taught even him a move or two."
—Newsweek
"Few books require a 'highly flammable' warning, but The Brief
Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz's long-awaited first
novel, will burn its way into your heart and sizzle your
senses. Díaz's novel is drenched in the heated rhythms of the
real world as much as it is laced with magical realism and classic
fantasy stories." —USA Today
"Dark and exuberant. . . this fierce, funny, tragic book is just
what a reader would have hoped for in a novel by Junot Díaz."
—Publishers Weekly
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