Drown

by Junot Díaz

Book Overview

El lector tiene en sus manos una colecci n de relatos que viene precedida de una enorme expectaci n. Su autor, seleccionado por Newsweek como uno de los diez nuevos rostros para el noventa y seis, nos... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1573226068
• Release Date: January 1996
• Publisher: Riverhead Books
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 0.6" x 5.1"

Customer Reviews

Hilarious and very entertaining

Read and enjoy. It might be a bit vulgar,especially if you understand Spanish. Otherwise the story is well written and I enjoyed how the characters were intertwined from beginning to end.

Muy buen libro de cuentos

Leyendo este libro me di cuenta de porque tan buenas criticas, lo lei despues de haber leido La maravillosa & breve vida de Oscar Wao, lo que puedo decir es que el potencial de Junot queda mas que plasmado en estas pequeñas historias. Aunque hubiese sido mejor para mi una novela, o que los mismos cuentos fueran mas largos, sin dudas se disfrutan perfectamente. Algo que realmente no me gusto, es el titulo, negocios es tan solo uno de los cuentos que se encuentran aquí y le da una percepción errada a quien ve la portada (si, se que los libros no se juzgan por la portada, pero algunas personas no pueden evitarlo), yo sin dudas hubiese escogido otro titulo.

Sensibly Unapologetic and Seductive

This explosive collection of ten amazing stories vividly chronicling the Dominican immigrant experience is starkly realistic and daring. The stories are not necessarily pleasant, but are certainly captivating tales of the resilience of the human soul and of the will to survive in the face of horrendous odds. Diaz is intense and powerful, yet he possesses what I personally find to be a calculated calm in his mesmerizing prose. Moreover, he is totally unapologetic ---and that's a plus. I thoroughly enjoyed every piece in this stunning collection. Junot Diaz is at the top of my list. You are missing a rare literary experience if you fail to read him.Very Highly Recommended !Alan CambeiraAuthor of AZUCAR! The Story of Sugar (a novel)

Beautiful and stunning

This book is a most honest and basic portrayal of humanity. Diaz's language is simple yet beautiful, and his themes are universal yet deeply challenging. The book follows the lives of different people, mostly Dominican, but it's characters relate to the reader's most basic human soul in the same way that Holden Caulfield does. A Brilliant Work

The Immigrant Experience

This exceedingly strong debut collection of stories is set in the ghettos of the Dominican Republic and New Jersey, but most of all in the invisible psychic landscape of the immigrants who move from the first to the latter. Six of the ten stories here may be familiar to readers of The New Yorker, Story, or other well-regarded literary mags in whose pages they previously appeared. Díaz's stories offer grimly matter-of-fact accounts of harsh childhoods in harsh environments where fathers are either feared or absent and mothers are exhausted and resigned to their fate.The stories set in the DR are from a youth's perspective, and have the unmistakable whiff of the autobiographical about them. In "Ysrael", the narrator and his brother are sent to the campo for the summer to live with relatives. There, they are casually cruel to a local boy whose face was disfigured by a pig. The boy later turns up as the subject of "No Face", which attempts to delve into his mind, with lesser effect than almost all the other stories. A third story, "Arguantando" follows the family from "Ysrael" as they wait to hear from their father, who has moved to the US. The final and longest story in the collection, "Negocios", explains the father's journey to the US and his many trials and tribulations before he can bring his family over.The stories set in the US follow the young boy as he grows older in New Jersey-where shoplifting, drug dealing, and eventually work replace the poverty of the slums of Santa Domingo. "Fiesta, 1980" is the best car-sickness story you're likely to read and "How To Date" is a quick guide to interracial dating, perhaps overly flip when compared to the other stories. In "Aurora", a teenage drug dealer (the young boy grown older?) daydreams about a normal life with a crack-addicted girl. The same character reappears in "Drown", describing a former close friend's homosexual advances and his own ambivalence.My favorite two stories were "Boyfriend" and "Edison, New Jersey". The first is a very brief story about a young man overhearing his downstairs neighbor's breakup, and working up the courage to eventually speak to her. The second is about a young man who helps deliver and assemble pool tables for a living and his well-meaning attempt to help a Dominican girl escape a life of sexual service. Both stories contain a wistful nostalgic air that's both dead on and haunting. All of Díaz's stories are immensely satisfying, and taken as a whole, they form an excellent picture of the Dominican immigrant experience. It's been six years now since this collection came out, and hopefully we'll be seeing something new soon from him.