Junot Diaz

 

 

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Born 31 December 1968 in Santo Domingo), Junot Diaz is a contemporary Dominican-American writer. He moved to the United States with his parents at age six, settling in New Jersey. Central to Díaz's work is the duality of the immigrant experience.

 

 

His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker magazine which listed him as one of the 20 top writers for the 21st century. He has also been published in Story, The Paris Review, and in the anthologies Best American Short Stories four times (1996, 1997, 1999, 2000), and African Voices. He is best known for his two major works: the short story collection Drown (1996) and the novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). Both were published to critical acclaim.

 

 

He has received a Eugene McDermott Award, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, a Lila Acheson Wallace Readers Digest Award, the 2002 Pen/Malamud Award, the 2003 US-Japan Creative Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He won the 2007 Sargant First Novel Prize and was selected as one of the 39 most important Latin American writers under the age of 39 by the Bogotá Book Capital of World and the Hay Festival. In September of 2007, Miramax acquired the rights for a film adaptation of The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

 

 

The stories in Drown focus on the teenage narrator's impoverished, fatherless youth in the Dominican Republic and his struggle adapting to his new life in New Jersey. Reviews were generally strong but not without numerous complaints. The titles in the collection include "Ysrael", "Fiesta, 1980", "Aurora", "Drown", "Boyfriend", "Edison, New Jersey", "How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie", "No Face", "Negocios". Diaz has read twice for PRI's This American Life: "How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie in 1998, and "Edison, New Jersey" in 1997. Díaz also published a Spanish translation of' Drown, entitled Negocios. The arrival of his novel ("The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) in 2007 prompted a minor re-appraisal of Diaz's earlier work. His first book "Drown" was now being widely recognized as an important landmark in contemporary literature—ten years after publication—even by critics who had either entirely ignored the book or had given it poor reviews.

 

 

Díaz's first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was released in September 2007. (An excerpt from the novel had appeared previously in The New Yorker's 2007 Summer Fiction issue.) In an unusually favorable review, the New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani characterized Díaz's writing in the novel as:

 

a sort of streetwise brand of Spanglish that even the most monolingual reader can easily inhale: lots of flash words and razzle-dazzle talk, lots of body language on the sentences, lots of David Foster Wallace-esque footnotes and asides. And he conjures with seemingly effortless aplomb the two worlds his characters inhabit: the Dominican Republic, the ghost-haunted motherland that shapes their nightmares and their dreams; and America (a.k.a. New Jersey), the land of freedom and hope and not-so-shiny possibilities that they’ve fled to as part of the great Dominican diaspora.

 

 

Writing in Time magazine critic Lev Grossman said that Díaz's novel was:

 

so astoundingly great that in a fall crowded with heavyweights--Richard Russo, Philip Roth--Díaz is a good bet to run away with the field. You could call The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead; 352 pages), out on Sept. 6, the saga of an immigrant family, but that wouldn't really be fair. It's an immigrant-family saga for people who don't read immigrant-family sagas. The family in question emigrated from the Dominican Republic and consists of a mother, a son and a daughter--the father having done a runner some years earlier. 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. As Oscar and Lola grow up and go to college, they find themselves fighting the lingering dooms of the old country, the alien demands of New Jersey and the depredations of their romantic hearts, all at the same time. It's an unwinnable three-front war, and the outcome isn't a fantasy; it's brutal reality.

 

 

"The Brief Wondrous life of Oscar Wao" was awarded the Sargent First Novel Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Novel of 2007. The novel was selected by Time and New York Magazine as the best novel of 2007. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Los Angeles Times, Village Voice, Christian Science Monitor, New Statesman, Washington Post and Publishers Weekly also placed the novel on their Best of 2007 lists. A poll by National Book Critics Circle ranked "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" as the most recommended novel by their members.

 

 

Bibliography

Short stories:

• "Ysrael" (Story, Autumn 1995)
• "How To Date A Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie" (The New Yorker, December 25, 1995)
• "Drown" (The New Yorker, January 29, 1996)
• "Fiesta 1980" (Story, Winter 1996)
• "The Sun, The Moon, The Stars" (The New Yorker, February 2, 1998)
• "Otravida, Otravez" (The New Yorker, June, 21, 1999)
• "Flaca" (Story, Autumn 1999)
• "Nilda" (The New Yorker, October 4, 1999)
• "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" (The New Yorker, December 25, 2000)
• "Homecoming, with Turtle" (The New Yorker, June 14, 2004)
• "Wildwood" (The New Yorker, November 18, 2007)
• "Alma" (The New Yorker, December 24, 2007)

Books:

• Drown (Riverhead, New York, NY, 1996.)
• Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead, New York, NY, 2007.)

 

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