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The Brief Wondrous Lifeof Oscar Wao
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The Brief Wondrous Lifeof Oscar Wao Paperback - 2008

by Diaz, Junot

Winner of both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the most talked about--and praised--smash hit of 2007 follows the adventures of a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd plagued by a family curse.


Summary


Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd who—from the New Jersey home he shares with his old world mother and rebellious sister—dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, finding love. But Oscar may never get what he wants. Blame the fukú—a curse that has haunted Oscar’s family for generations, following them on their epic journey from Santo Domingo to the USA. Encapsulating Dominican-American history, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao opens our eyes to an astonishing vision of the contemporary American experience and explores the endless human capacity to persevere—and risk it all—in the name of love.

Listen to Junot Díaz’s interview on iTunes “Meet the Author” here.
Download iTunes here.

From the publisher

Winner of:
The Pulitzer Prize
The National Book Critics Circle Award
The Anisfield-Wolf Book Award
The Jon Sargent, Sr. First Novel Prize
A Time Magazine #1 Fiction Book of the Year
One of the best books of 2007 according to: The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, People, The Village Voice, Time Out New York, Salon, Baltimore City Paper, The Christian Science Monitor, Booklist, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, New York Public Library, and many more... Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read

Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd who--from the New Jersey home he shares with his old world mother and rebellious sister--dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, finding love. But Oscar may never get what he wants. Blame the fuk--a curse that has haunted Oscar's family for generations, following them on their epic journey from Santo Domingo to the USA. Encapsulating Dominican-American history, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao opens our eyes to an astonishing vision of the contemporary American experience and explores the endless human capacity to persevere--and risk it all--in the name of love.

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Details

  • Title The Brief Wondrous Lifeof Oscar Wao
  • Author Diaz, Junot
  • Binding Paperback
  • Edition [ Edition: Repri
  • Pages 352
  • Language EN
  • Publisher Riverhead Trade, New York
  • Date 2008-09-02
  • ISBN 9781594483295
  • Themes
    • Catalog Heading: Language Arts/Literature
    • Curriculum Strand: Language Arts/Literature
    • Ethnic Orientation: Hispanic
    • Ethnic Orientation: Latino
    • Topical: Coming of Age

Media reviews

“Funny, street-smart and keenly observed…An extraordinarily vibrant book that’s fueled by adrenaline-powered prose.”—Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

“Díaz finds a miraculous balance. He cuts his barnburning comic-book plots (escape, ruin, redemption) with honest, messy realism, and his narrator speaks in a dazzling hash of Spanish, English, slang, literary flourishes, and pure virginal dorkiness.”—Sam Anderson, New York Magazine

“Genius...a story of the American experience that is giddily glorious and hauntingly horrific...That Díaz’s novel is also full of ideas, that [the narrator’s] brilliant talking rivals the monologues of Roth’s Zuckerman—in short, that what he has produced is a kick-ass (and truly, that is the just word for it) work of modern fiction—all make The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao something exceedingly rare: a book in which a new America can recognize itself, but so can everyone else.”—Oscar Villalon, San Francisco Chronicle

“Astoundingly great.”—Lev Grossman, Time

“Terrific...High-energy...It is a joy to read, and every bit as exhilarating to reread.”—Jennifer Reese, Entertainment Weekly

Citations

  • Commonweal, 12/05/2008, Page 26
  • Entertainment Weekly, 08/12/2008, Page 144
  • New York Times Book Review, 09/14/2008, Page 28
  • People Weekly, 12/24/2012, Page 49
  • Poder Hispanic, 09/01/2008, Page 52
  • Village Voice, 12/23/2009, Page 28

About the author

Junot Daz 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; This Is How You Lose Her, a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist; and a debut picture book, Islandborn. 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, Daz is currently the fiction editor at Boston Review and the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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