Drown

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 have been several noteworthy literary debuts this year, but Díaz deserves to be singled out for the distinctiveness and caliber of his voice, and for his ability to sum up a range of cultural and cross-cultural experiences in a few sharp images…. The motifs—the father absent and indifferent to the family, his infidelities and bullying while they’re united, the shabby disrepair of northern New Jersey—resonate from story to story and give Drown its cohesion and weight…. These are powerful and convincing stories. And what is powerful in these stories isn’t their cultural message, though that is strong, but a broader, more basic theme…. These 10 finely achieved short stories reveal a writer who will still have something to say after he has used up his own youthful experiences and heartaches.”

- The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Talent this big will always make noise…. [The ten stories in Drown] vividly evoke Díaz’s hardscrabble youth in the Dominican Republic and New Jersey, where ‘our community was separated from all the other communities by a six-lane highway and the dump.’ Díaz has the dispassionate eye of a journalist and the tongue of a poet…”

- Newsweek