Skylight Books Podcast Series JUNOT DIAZ reads from THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE HER
Sep 26, 2014
01:07:59
This Is How You Lose Her (Riverhead Books) Join us tonight for a very special reading from one of our generation's most celebrated writers, Junot Diaz! Junot is visiting Los Angeles for the Library Foundation of Los Angeles' 22nd Anniversary Celebration, during which he will receive the Los Angeles Public Library's 2014 Literary Award. To learn more about the work of the Library Foundation, visit lfla.org.
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 a literary sensation, topping best-of-the-year lists and winning a host of major awards, including the Pulitzer Prize. Now Díaz turns his remarkable talent to the haunting, impossible power of love—obsessive love, illicit love, fading love, maternal love. This Is How You Lose Her (Riverhead) is one of the most celebrated books of last year. In prose that is endlessly energetic, inventive, tender, and funny, Díaz’s stories 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.” 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. Praise for This Is How You Lose Her "Junot Diaz writes in an idiom so electrifying and distinct it's practically an act of aggression, at once enthralling, even erotic in its assertion of sudden intimacy... [It is] a syncopated swagger-step between opacity and transparency, exclusion and inclusion, defiance and desire... His prose style is so irresistible, so sheerly entertaining, it risks blinding readers to its larger offerings. Yet he weds form so ideally to content that instead of blinding us, it becomes the very lens through which we can see the joy and suffering of the signature Diaz subject: what it means to belong to a diaspora, to live out the possibilities and ambiguities of perpetual insider/outsider status." -"The New York Times Book Review " "Nobody does scrappy, sassy, twice-the-speed of sound dialogue better than Junot Diaz. His exuberant short story collection, called This Is How You Lose Her, charts the lives of Dominican immigrants for whom the promise of America comes down to a minimum-wage paycheck, an occasional walk to a movie in a mall and the momentary escape of a grappling in bed." -Maureen Corrigan, NPR "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" "Searing, irresistible new stories... It's a harsh world Diaz conjures but one filled also with beauty and humor and buoyed by the stubborn resilience of the human spirit." -"People " Junot Diaz 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, Diaz is currently the fiction editor at Boston Review and the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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 a literary sensation, topping best-of-the-year lists and winning a host of major awards, including the Pulitzer Prize. Now Díaz turns his remarkable talent to the haunting, impossible power of love—obsessive love, illicit love, fading love, maternal love. This Is How You Lose Her (Riverhead) is one of the most celebrated books of last year. In prose that is endlessly energetic, inventive, tender, and funny, Díaz’s stories 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.” 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. Praise for This Is How You Lose Her "Junot Diaz writes in an idiom so electrifying and distinct it's practically an act of aggression, at once enthralling, even erotic in its assertion of sudden intimacy... [It is] a syncopated swagger-step between opacity and transparency, exclusion and inclusion, defiance and desire... His prose style is so irresistible, so sheerly entertaining, it risks blinding readers to its larger offerings. Yet he weds form so ideally to content that instead of blinding us, it becomes the very lens through which we can see the joy and suffering of the signature Diaz subject: what it means to belong to a diaspora, to live out the possibilities and ambiguities of perpetual insider/outsider status." -"The New York Times Book Review " "Nobody does scrappy, sassy, twice-the-speed of sound dialogue better than Junot Diaz. His exuberant short story collection, called This Is How You Lose Her, charts the lives of Dominican immigrants for whom the promise of America comes down to a minimum-wage paycheck, an occasional walk to a movie in a mall and the momentary escape of a grappling in bed." -Maureen Corrigan, NPR "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" "Searing, irresistible new stories... It's a harsh world Diaz conjures but one filled also with beauty and humor and buoyed by the stubborn resilience of the human spirit." -"People " Junot Diaz 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, Diaz is currently the fiction editor at Boston Review and the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.