- Paperback: 176 pages
- Publisher: Faber and Faber; New edition edition (20 Oct 1997)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0571190634
- ISBN-13: 978-0571191949
- Product Dimensions: 20.4 x 12.4 x 1.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 369,527 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Book Description
The first book by Junot Díaz, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
Product Description
Junot Diaz made his remarkable debut as a writer with this collection of stories that move from the barrios of the Dominican Republic to the struggling urban communities of New Jersey. The stories are all unflinching and strong and Diaz's prose crackles with an electric sense of discovery. In 'Ysrael', two brothers hunt a disfigured boy who hides behind a mask; in 'No Face', the mirror is flipped and the perspective belongs to the tormented. In 'Fiesta 1980', a spirited family gathering plays against the noiseless hum of a father's infidelities. In 'Boyfriend', a young man eavesdrops on the woman next door and colours in the life overheard with his own intense longing. There is an urgency and clarity to these beautifully crafted stories that renders them entirely of the moment. Diaz has veered off the well-travelled roads of contemporary fiction and captured a range of experience previously uncharted and now emphatically his own.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Junot Diaz has been hailed as one of a new breed of East Coast talents. His insight into the Spanish American experience in the US can be deservedly labeled as profoundly moving and richly complex. It is astonishing how little attention has thus far been paid to this element of American culture, but let's hope that Diaz's work will go some way to redressing this imbalance.
The stories in Drown focus on characters who have managed to survive domestic abuse, pandemic crime and crippling prejudice. Despite the recurrent and critically important theme of social dislocation, Diaz doesn't seek to simplify or patronize. His characters are individuals who make a convincing attempt to breathe beyond the pages of the book.
Diaz is a sympathetic narrator and his characters are emphatically three-dimensional. In the first story, told from the perspective of a young boy, his bullying and adulterous father is contrasted with his benevolent and loving Mother. However the father is not all beast and despite the misery he inflicts, the man is also full of a bitter regret for all that he has allowed to be lost between himself and his wife.
Despite their innate fragility, Diaz's characters have a revitalizing vigour. I think of the schoolboys who feel remorse for hunting and taunting the school freak, and the lover who regularly forgives his largely absent girlfriend who steals from him to feed her drug habit. These and other characters disappear, sometimes to return or more frequently indefinitely lost in a haze of pollution and dirt.
I recommend this book as an astonishingly effective piece of literature. More than this, there are, to my mind, few contemporary parallels. Buy it, read it, recommend it.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This book has been on my reading list for a creative writing course I teach for several years now, along with Maya Angelou, Michael Frayn, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Jenny Diski. And every year students have unanimously proclaimed this the best written and most impressive book on the reading list. Diaz has an ability to make writing seem effortless and artless. His settings and characters are real, the situations believable and the narrative voice compelling. He does not pander to the reader, retaining Spanish words with no glossary but they are used in a way that makes sense in their context and they provide a flavour of speech and thought that takes us into his world. The only writer I could fairly compare him with is Raymond Carver - the same truthfulness and directness - but stylistically Diaz is the superior writer. Recommended for any aspiring writer.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
DROWN by Junot Diaz spoke to me like no other work of fiction that I've read in many years. It was the first time where I saw myself in the characters and felt that I knew them intimately. They were like my own family, brothers, cousins, mother and father that I could almost feel that the stories were right out of my own childhood.
Diaz's stories about Domincans in the Dominican Republic and the U.S. The stories perfectly capture the struggle with poverty in the characters' native country as well as the United States. But these stories are not didactic pieces but rather human stories about family, love, and loss. With characters so real, that the reader will wonder when they will see them again.
Diaz's stories about Domincans in the Dominican Republic and the U.S. The stories perfectly capture the struggle with poverty in the characters' native country as well as the United States. But these stories are not didactic pieces but rather human stories about family, love, and loss. With characters so real, that the reader will wonder when they will see them again.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Drown
I previously read Oscar Wao and bought this as I thought I'd enjoy it. I've only read the first 3 stories and it is really difficult to put the book down, Diaz really does know how... Read more
Published 4 months ago by Alex Pughe
Beautiful
This is simply beautiful writing. Stories about real characters, writing that takes you deep into their crazy lives until you feel as though you knew them. Also quite funny.
Published 4 months ago by Shunzi
A masterpiece
A masterpiece of literary fiction. Diaz writes with not just remarkable skill and detail but also an ability to give his stories a low-slung hip-hop rhythm that no other writer in... Read more
Published 19 months ago by Junkyard Dog
Drown
There is something very refreshing about this gritty tale. It is a crystal clear image of the life of the dispossessed and the struggles they face, little frames of humanity... Read more
Published on 25 Mar 2010 by Book 1981
Not Drowing but very much Alive
First published in 1996, Junot Diaz's Drown is a collection of short stories. They are set in Santo Domingo and the typical US, African Caribbean diaspora of New York, New Jersey... Read more
Published on 24 Aug 2009 by Herman Norford
The brilliance is in capturing the tensions...
These stories are all different but form a continuum, overlapping and coming from different angles and times. Read more
Published on 24 Mar 2009 by stevieby
Fresher than a Caribbean Breeze
This is one of the freshest, most original books I have read in a very long time. The voice in this collection of short stories is utterly authentic and original. Read more
Published on 4 Sep 2001
Drown yourself in this book!!!
Junot Diaz is one of the best writers of short stories that I know of. Every on of these stories takes you in and makes you feel every emotion for the main characters. Read more
Published on 19 July 2001 by "mnpt"
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