Junot Diaz

Junot Diaz’s debut collection of short stories, Drown, appeared ten years ago and drew the kind of attention usually reserved for writers with more established résumés. A big part of that was the cool intensity of the prose, which chronicled the lives of adolescent boys living in hardscrabble communities in the Dominican Republic, or transplanted to equally challenging environments in New York and New Jersey. The stories were alternately grim and funny, and Diaz never condescended, making liberal use of native dialect and slang. So enthused were editors at the New Yorker that they named Diaz one of the twenty top writers for the twenty-first century. Something happened on the way to literary superstardom, however; a novel, A Cheater’s Guide to Love, was scheduled for release in 1997, but never appeared. Perhaps The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao has been salvaged from that earlier project, but who knows. Early indications are that this debut novel—a multicultural, multilingual tale of epic bad luck—more than justifies the decade-long wait. 952-920-0633; www.bn.com