Junot Díaz

Junot Díaz
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From all contemporary American authors, Junot Díaz is my favorite. He hasn't published much: Drown came in 1996, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao followed eleven years later, in 2007. He got a Pulitzer for both. This Is How You Loose Her is announced for this September. Besides, other stories and essays, most of them in The New Yorker.

Junot Díaz was born in the Dominican Republic and moved to US as a child: his assimilation in the new country followed the hard way, and his books are about immigrant experience. Not only. The universe of the native country is present, too, and it's a wonderful blend of two worlds.

No wonder that his writing is very direct and by all means streetwise, a continuous mix of Spanish expressions in the English flow - and his reviewers used for his style words as vulgar, or ribald - I would add that he knows how to balance his language, it's not about an illiterate bum, it's about a master of the language, and a master of the universes he depicts.

And beyond all the crude realism, there is a subtle romantic flavor: his books are about coming of age.

• Junot Díaz about Tokyo
• Living By the Book
• About Books, Love, Matriarchal Revolution, New York
• Michael Cunningham Praises the Book of Junot Díaz
• The Five Most Important Books for Junot Díaz
• Argot Dominicano (dedicado a Junot Díaz)
• Junot Díaz, Nueva York
• Junot Díaz, My Girl in Amsterdam
• Las mangostas eran guapas (The Mongoose and the Émigré)
• The Silence: The Legacy of Childhood Trauma

(A Life in Books)

(Una Vida Entre Libros)