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In This Is How You Lose Her (Riverhead), Pulitzer Prize-winner Junot Díaz lays bare the infinite longing and inevitable weaknesses of our all-too-human hearts. The stories in Díaz's newest collection capture the heat of new passion, the recklessness with which we betray what we most treasure, and the torture we go through to mend what we've broken beyond repair.
Pulitzer Prize-winner Junot Díaz’s first book, Drown, established him as a major new writer with “the dispassionate eye of a journalist and the tongue of a poet” (Newsweek). His first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, was named #1 Fiction Book of the Year” by Time magazine and spent more than 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, establishing itself – with more than a million copies in print — as a modern classic. In addition to the Pulitzer, Díaz has won a host of major awards and prizes, including the National Book Critic’s Circle Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, the PEN/O. Henry Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the Anisfield-Wolf Award.
Now Díaz turns his remarkable talent to the haunting, impossible power of love — obsessive love, illicit love, fading love, maternal love. On a beach in the Dominican Republic, a doomed relationship flounders. In the heat of a hospital laundry room in New Jersey, a woman does her lover’s washing and thinks about his wife. In Boston, a man buys his love child, his only son, a first baseball bat and glove. At the heart of these stories is the irrepressible, irresistible Yunior, a young hardhead whose longing for love is equaled only by his recklessness — and by the extraordinary women he loves and loses: artistic Alma; the aging Miss Lora; Magdalena, who thinks all Dominican men are cheaters; and the love of his life, whose heartbreak ultimately becomes his own. In prose that is endlessly energetic, inventive, tender, and funny, the stories in the New York Times-Bestselling This Is How You Lose Her lay bare the infinite longing and inevitable weakness of the human heart. They remind us that passion always triumphs over experience, and that “the half-life of love is forever.”
Review:
"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." Publishers Weekly (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." Booklist (starred review)
Review:
"Diaz's third book is as stunning as its predecessors. These stories are hard and sad, but in Diaz's hands they also crackle." Library Journal (starred)
Review:
"One of contemporary fiction's most distinctive and irresistible voices." Michiko Kakutani, the New York Times
Review:
"Talent this big will always make noise." Newsweek
Review:
"Graceful and raw and painful and smart....The pages turn and all of a sudden you're done and you want more." The Boston Globe
Review:
"Like Raymond Carver, Diaz transfigures disorder and disorientation with a rigorous sense of form....[He] wrings the heart with finely calibrated restraint." The New York Times Book Review
Review:
"Exhibits the potent blend of literary eloquence and street cred that earned him a Pulitzer Prize....Diaz's prose is vulgar, brave, and poetic." O Magazine
Junot Díaz was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Drown; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and This Is How You Lose Her, a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist. He is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, PEN/Malamud Award, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and PEN/O. Henry Award. A graduate of Rutgers College, Díaz is currently the fiction editor at Boston Review and the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"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."
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