Authors: Junot Diaz
ISBN-13: 9781594483295, ISBN-10: 1594483299
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)
Date Published: September 2008
Edition: Reprint
Dominican-American writer Junot Díaz has spun the heartbreak and loneliness of the immigrant experience into literary gold with memorable stories of marginalized outsiders caught between two cultures.
The long-awaited-and thrillingly satisfying, genuinely original-first novel from the unmistakable voice behind the story collection Drown.
In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Diaz, the author of a book of sexy, diamond-sharp stories called Drown, shows impressive high-low dexterity, flashing his geek credentials, his street wisdom and his literary learning with equal panache…Diaz's novel also has a wild, capacious spirit, making it feel much larger than it is. Within its relatively compact span, [it] contains an unruly multitude of styles and genres. The tale of Oscar's coming-of-age is in some ways the book's thinnest layer, a young-adult melodrama draped over a multigenerational immigrant family chronicle that dabbles in tropical magic realism, punk-rock feminism, hip-hop machismo, post-postmodern pyrotechnics and enough polymorphous multiculturalism to fill up an Introduction to Cultural Studies syllabus. Holding all this togetherjust barely, but in the end effectivelyis a voice that is profane, lyrical, learned and tireless, a riot of accents and idioms coexisting within a single personality.