Junot Diaz

Guest of the Corpus Christi Literary Reading Series in September, 2002

Junot Diaz was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. He is a graduate of Rutgers University and received his Master of Fine Arts Degree from Cornell University. His fiction has appeared in Story, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Best American Short Stories 1996 and African Verse. He lives in New York City and is at work on his first novel.

Drown Junot Diaz makes this remarkable debut with stories that move from the barrios of the Dominican Republic to the struggling urban communities of New Jersey. Diaz's work is unflinching and strong, and his prose crackles with an electric sense of discovery. Already praised by Newsweek as having 'the dispassionate eye of a journalist and the tongue of a poet', he evokes a world in which fathers are gone, mothers fight with grim determination for their families and themselves, and the next generation inherits the casual cruelty, devastating ambivalence and knowing humour of lives circumscribed by poverty. In DROWN, Diaz has harnessed the rhythms of anger and release, frustration and joy, to indelible effect.

In 'Yerael', two brothers hunt a disfigured boy who hides behind a mask; in 'No Face', the mirror is flipped and perspective belongs to the tormented. In 'Fiesta, 1980', a spirited family gathering plays against the noiseless hum of a father's infidelities. In 'Boyfriend', a young man eavesdrops on the woman next door and colours in the life overheard with his own intense longing. And always, it seems, there is the throb of waiting: in 'Aguantando', for the fulfilment of a promise; in 'Negocios', for rescue; in 'Aurora', for respite; in 'Drown', for resolution.

There is an urgency and a clarity to these beautifully crafted stories that renders them entirely of the moment. Diaz has veered off the well-travelled roads of contemporary fiction and captured a range of experience previously uncharted and now emphatically his own.

--from the sleevenotes of DROWN