Riverhead Trade
Price: $14.00
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JUNOT DIAZ reads from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao THIS EVENT IS SOLD OUT... Missed out on tickets? Join us at 8 pm back at the store for an open-to-the-public book signing with Mr. Diaz.
Harvard Book Store is delighted to welcome back Junot Diaz in conjunction with the paperback release of his riotous, Pulitzer Prize–winning first novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. A voucher on the $15 ticket will be redeemable for one copy of the new paperback, scheduled to go on sale Sept. 2nd. Those who missed out on tickets are invited to meet Mr. Diaz at Harvard Book Store following the Brattle event. Mr. Diaz will sign copies of his books at our store beginning at approximately 8 pm. Exuberance for Oscar Wao "Paralleling his own experiences growing up in the Dominican Republic and New Jersey, [Diaz] has choreographed a family saga at once sanguinary and sexy that confronts the horrific brutality at loose during the reign of the dictator Trujillo. Diaz's besieged characters look to the supernatural for explanations and hope, from fuku, the curse unleashed when Europeans arrived on Hispaniola, to the forces dramatized in the works of science fiction and fantasy so beloved by the chubby ghetto nerd Oscar Wao, the brilliantly realized boy of conscience at the center of this whirlwind tale. Writing in a combustible mix of slang and lyricism, Díaz loops back and forth in time and place, generating sly and lascivious humor in counterpoint to tyranny and sorrow. And his characters—Oscar, the hopeless romantic; Lola, his no-nonsense sister; their heartbroken mother; and the irresistible homeboy narrator—cling to life with the magical strength of superheroes, yet how vibrantly human they are. Propelled by compassion, Diaz's novel is intrepid and radiant." —Booklist (starred) "Funny, street-smart and keenly observed.... An extraordinarily vibrant book that's fueled by adrenaline-powered prose.... A book that decisively establishes [Diaz] as one of contemporary fiction's most distinctive and irresistible new voices."
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times “Diaz finds a miraculous balance. He cuts his barnburning 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.” —Sam Anderson, New York Magazine
“Genius...a story of the American experience that is giddily glorious and hauntingly horrific...That Diaz’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 the just 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.” —Oscar Villalon, San Francisco Chronicle
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Junot Diaz's first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His debut story collection, 1996's Drown, was a publishing sensation of unprecedented acclaim, became a national bestseller, won numerous awards, and is now a landmark of contemporary literature. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Best American Short Stories. He was born in the Dominican Republic and moved to New Jersey with his parents when he was six. He now lives in New York City and Cambridge, where he teaches creative writing at MIT.
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