Junot Díaz Books In Order

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Junot Díaz
Junot Diaz is a creative writing professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, writer, and was the fiction editor at Boston Review He.was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic on December 31, 1968, and he grew up in New Jersey.

Junot was the third child among seven kids. Throughout much of his childhood, he lived with his mom and grandparents as his dad worked in America. In December of 1974 he immigrated to Parlin, New Jersey, where he was finally reunited with his dad. While here, he lived less than one mile from what he’s described as one of the biggest landfills in the whole state.

He went to Madison Park Elementary, and was an avid reader, often walking four miles just to borrow books from his public library. During this time, he became fascinated with apocalyptic books and films, particularly the work of John Christopher, “Edge of Darkness” the BBC mini-series, and the original “Planet of the Apes” movies.

While growing up he struggled a lot with learning English. It was a miserable experience for Junot, particularly since it seemed that every single one of his other siblings acquired a grasp of the language in just months, and felt to him like it was overnight. While his school took a notice his family was contacted and he soon got placed in special education to help him with further resources and opportunities to learn the language.

Junot graduated from Cedar Ridge High School in the year 1987 in Old Bridge Township, New Jersey, although he would not start writing formally until years later. He is a graduate of Rutgers College, receiving his BA in 1992, majoring in English.

While at Rutgers, he was involved in Demarest Hall, a creative writing, living-learning, residence hall, and in various student organizations. He was exposed to Sandra Cisneros and Toni Morrison, authors that would motivate him to also become an author.

He worked his way through college by washing dishes, delivering pool tables, pumping gas, and working at Raritan River Steel.

After graduating from Rutgers, he worked at Rutgers University Press as an editorial assistant. During this time he also first created the quasi-autobiographical character of Yunior in this story Junot used as a part of his application to his MFA program during the early 90s. This character would become crucial to much of his later work including “Drown” and “This is How You Lose Her”. His idea for Yunior was to write six, maybe seven books about him which would form a single large novel. In 1995, he earned his MFA from Cornell University, where he wrote much of his first collection of short stories.

His work has been published in Enkare Review, Story, and The Paris Review, as well as the anthologies The Best American Short Stories (1996, 1997, 1999, 2000, and 2013), African Voices, and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2009.

Junot lives in a domestic partnership with Marjorie Liu, a paranormal romance author.

“The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. “This is How You Lose Her” was a National Book Award finalist and a New York Times Bestseller. Junot has received the PEN/Malamud Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, a PEN/O. Henry Award, and a Dayton Literary Prize. In 2017, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

“Drown” is the first short story collection and was released in 1996. Ten tales which move from the barrios of the Dominican Republic to the struggling urban communities in New Jersey, Junot makes his remarkable debut. His work is strong and unflinching, and these stories each crackle with this electric sense of discovery.

He evokes a world in which dads have gone, moms fight with grim determination for their families as well as themselves, and the next generation inherits the devastating ambivalence, casual cruelty, and knowing humor lives circumscribed by uncertainty and poverty. With “Drown”, Junot has harnessed the rhythms of joy and frustration, release and anger to indelible effect.

“The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” is the first stand alone novel and was released in 2007. Things have never been easy for Oscar, a disastrously overweight yet sweet, lovesick Dominican ghetto nerd. From his New Jersey home, where he lives with his old-world mom and rebellious sister, he dreams about becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien and, most importantly, of finding love.

However he might never get that, because thanks to the Fukœ; which is the curse that has haunted Oscar’s family for generations and doomed them to torture, prison, tragic accidents, and most of all, ill-starred love. Still waiting for his very first kiss, is only its most recent victim.

Diaz immerses the reader in the tumultuous life of Oscar and the history of his family at large, rendering with dazzling energy and genuine warmth, humor and insight the Dominican-American experience, and ultimately, the endless human capacity to persevere in the face of loss and heartbreak. This is a true literary triumph, and confirms Junot Diaz as one of the most exciting and best voices of our time.

“This is How You Lose Her” is the second short story collection and was released in 2012. A doomed relationship flounders, on a beach in the Dominican Republic. In the heat of a hospital’s laundry room in Jersey, a woman does the washing of her lover, and thinks of his wife. In Boston, a man buys his only son, his love child, a first baseball bat and a mitt.

At the core of these tales is the irrepressible, irresistible Yunior, a young hardhead whose own longing for love is equaled just by his recklessness, as well as by the extraordinary women that he loses and loves. The aging Miss Lora, artistic Alma, Magdalena (who believes all Dominican men are cheaters), and the love of his life, whose own heartbreak ultimately becomes Yunior’s too.

With prose that is endlessly energetic, tender, inventive, and funny, the stories in this collection lay bare the inevitable weakness and infinite longing of the human heart. They remind us that passion will always triumph over experience, and that the half-life of love is forever.

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