Claire Messud's new novel, The Woman Upstairs, is fiercely intelligent and urgently intimate, written with precision, humor, and an incredible...
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lamariscal, January 30, 2013 (view all comments by lamariscal)
A great weekend read. Yunior is back and teaches us many ways on how to go about not holding on to a loved one. The err of his ways leads him into more love turmoil episodes. Looking forward to how he would next mess up his love relationships is what kept me reading. Great book to sit down and enjoy with a beer or glass of wine; or a bottle.
leefline, January 30, 2013 (view all comments by leefline)
Junot is back! He knows how to tell a story and he always leaves you wanting more. Through Junior he teaches us about intimacy (with others and self), history and life. I don't know how he does it, but his writing style is just so real.
Jark, January 30, 2013 (view all comments by Jark)
This was the best book I read in 2012, and probably the favorite of many other people. Deservedly so.
Pamela Erbe, January 30, 2013 (view all comments by Pamela Erbe)
The voice Junot Diaz gives to the Dominican immigrants in this brilliant collection of stories is authentic and in your face, plaintive and heartbreaking, and never maudlin or sentimentalized. The Dominicans themselves are the same. Somewhere between hip-hop and Shakespeare--Diaz has the most interesting voice in American fiction.
"Review"
by Publishers Weekly (starred),
"Searing, sometimes hilarious, and always disarming....Readers will remember why everyone wants to write like Diaz, bring him home, or both. Raw and honest, these stories pulsate with raspy ghetto hip-hop and the subtler yet more vital echo of the human heart."
"Review"
by Booklist (starred review),
"Diaz's standout fiction remains pinpoint, sinuous, gutsy, and imaginative....Each taut tale of unrequited and betrayed love and family crises is electric with passionate observations and off-the-charts emotional and social intelligence....Fast-paced, unflinching, complexly funny, street-talking tough, perfectly made, and deeply sensitive, Diaz's gripping stories unveil lives shadowed by prejudice and poverty and bereft of reliable love and trust. These are precarious, unappreciated, precious lives in which intimacy is a lost art, masculinity a parody, and kindness, reason, and hope struggle to survive like seedlings in a war zone."
"Review"
by Library Journal (starred),
"Diaz's third book is as stunning as its predecessors. These stories are hard and sad, but in Diaz's hands they also crackle."
"Review"
by Michiko Kakutani, the New York Times,
"One of contemporary fiction's most distinctive and irresistible voices."
"Review"
by Newsweek,
"Talent this big will always make noise."
"Review"
by The Boston Globe,
"Graceful and raw and painful and smart....The pages turn and all of a sudden you're done and you want more."
"Review"
by The New York Times Book Review,
"Like Raymond Carver, Diaz transfigures disorder and disorientation with a rigorous sense of form....[He] wrings the heart with finely calibrated restraint."
"Review"
by O Magazine,
"Exhibits the potent blend of literary eloquence and street cred that earned him a Pulitzer Prize....Diaz's prose is vulgar, brave, and poetic."
"Synopsis"
by Firebrand,
Junot Diaz burst into the literary world with Drown, a collection of indelible stories that revealed a major new writer with the "eye of a journalist and the tongue of a poet" (Newsweek). His eagerly awaited first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, arrived like a thunderclap, topping best-of-the-year lists and winning a host of major awards, including the Pulitzer Prize. Now Diaz turns his prodigious talent to the haunting, impossible power of love.
The stories in This Is How You Lose Her, by turns hilarious and devastating, raucous and tender, lay bare the infinite longing and inevitable weaknesses of our all-too-human hearts. They capture the heat of new passion, the recklessness with which we betray what we most treasure, and the torture we go through — "the begging, the crawling over glass, the crying" — to try to mend what we've broken beyond repair. They recall the echoes that intimacy leaves behind, even where we thought we did not care. They teach us the catechism of affections: that the faithlessness of the fathers is visited upon the children; that what we do unto our exes is inevitably done in turn unto us; and that loving thy neighbor as thyself is a commandment more safely honored on platonic than erotic terms. Most of all, these stories remind us that the habit of passion always triumphs over experience, and that "love, when it hits us for real, has a half-life of forever."
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