Junot Diaz Popular Books

Junot Diaz Biography & Facts

Junot Díaz (; born December 31, 1968) is a Dominican-American writer, creative writing professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a former fiction editor at Boston Review. He also serves on the board of advisers for Freedom University, a volunteer organization in Georgia that provides post-secondary instruction to undocumented immigrants. Central to Díaz's work is the immigrant experience, particularly the Latino immigrant experience.Born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Díaz migrated with his family to New Jersey when he was six years old. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Rutgers University, and shortly after graduating created the character "Yunior", who served as narrator of several of his later books. After obtaining his MFA from Cornell University, Díaz published his first book, the 1995 short story collection Drown. Diaz received the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and received a MacArthur Fellowship "Genius Grant" in 2012. Early life Díaz was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. He was the third child among seven siblings. Throughout most of his early childhood, he lived with his mother and grandparents while his father worked in the United States. In December 1974 he migrated to Parlin, New Jersey, where he was re-united with his father. There he lived less than a mile from what he has described as "one of the largest landfills in New Jersey".Díaz attended Madison Park Elementary and was a voracious reader, often walking four miles in order to borrow books from his public library. At this time Díaz became fascinated with apocalyptic films and books, especially the work of John Christopher, the original Planet of the Apes films, and the BBC mini-series Edge of Darkness. Growing up Diaz struggled greatly with learning the English language. He comments that it "was a miserable experience" for him, especially since it seemed that all of his other siblings "acquired the language in a matter of months; in some ways it felt overnight". As his school took notice Diaz's family was contacted and he soon was placed in special education to provide him with more resources and opportunities to learn the language.Díaz graduated from Cedar Ridge High School in 1987 (now called Old Bridge High School) in Old Bridge Township, New Jersey, though he would not begin to write formally until years later. Career Díaz attended Kean College in Union, New Jersey, for one year before transferring and ultimately completing his BA at Rutgers University-New Brunswick in 1992, majoring in English; there he was involved in Demarest Hall, a creative-writing, living-learning, residence hall, and in various student organizations. He was exposed to the authors who would motivate him to become a writer: Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros. He worked his way through college by delivering pool tables, washing dishes, pumping gas, and working at Raritan River Steel. During an interview conducted in 2010, Díaz reflected on his experience growing up in America and working his way through college: I can safely say I've seen the US from the bottom up ... I may be a success story as an individual. But if you adjust the knob and just take it back one setting to the family unit, I would say my family tells a much more complicated story. It tells the story of two kids in prison. It tells the story of enormous poverty, of tremendous difficulty. A pervasive theme in his short story collection Drown (1996) is the absence of a father, which reflects Diaz's strained relationship with his own father, with whom he no longer keeps in contact. When Diaz once published an article in a Dominican newspaper condemning the country's treatment of Haitians, his father wrote a letter to the editor saying that the writer of the article should "go back home to Haiti".After graduating from Rutgers, Díaz worked at Rutgers University Press as an editorial assistant. At this time he also first created the quasi-autobiographical character of Yunior in a story Díaz used as part of his application for his MFA program in the early 1990s. The character would become important to much of his later work including Drown and This Is How You Lose Her (2012). Yunior would become central to much of Diaz's work, Diaz later explaining how "My idea, ever since Drown, was to write six or seven books about him that would form one big novel". Díaz earned his MFA from Cornell University in 1995, where he wrote most of his first collection of short stories. Díaz teaches creative writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing and was the fiction editor for Boston Review. He is active in the Dominican American community and is a founding member of the Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation, which focuses on writers of color. He was a Millet Writing Fellow at Wesleyan University, in 2009, and participated in Wesleyan's Distinguished Writers Series. Personal life Díaz lives in a domestic partnership with paranormal romance writer Marjorie Liu. Work 1994–2004: Early work and Drown Díaz's short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker magazine, which listed him as one of the 20 top writers for the 21st century. He has been published in Story, The Paris Review, Enkare Review and in the anthologies The Best American Short Stories five times (1996, 1997, 1999, 2000, 2013), The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories (2009), and African Voices. He is best known for his two major works: the short story collection Drown (1996) and the novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). Both were published to critical acclaim and he won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the latter. Diaz himself has described his writing style as "a disobedient child of New Jersey and the Dominican Republic if that can be possibly imagined with way too much education".Díaz has received a [Eugene McDermott] Award, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, a Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Writers Award, the 2002 PEN/Malamud Award, the 2003 US-Japan Creative Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was selected as one of the 39 most important Latin American writers under the age of 39 by the Bogotá World Book Capital and the Hay Festival.The stories in Drown focus on the teenage narrator's impoverished, fatherless youth in the Dominican Republic and his struggle adapting to his new life in New Jersey. Reviews were generally strong but not without complaints. Díaz read twice for PRI's This American Life: "Edison, New Jersey" in 1997 and "How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie)" in 1998. Díaz also published a Spanish translation of' Drown, entitled Negocios. The arrival of his novel (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) in 2007 prompted a noticeable .... Discover the Junot Diaz popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Junot Diaz books.

Best Seller Junot Diaz Books of 2024

  • Alice and the Fly synopsis, comments

    Alice and the Fly

    James Rice

    'Powerful' Closer'A darkly quirky story of love, obsession and fear . . . a beautiful story hung around the enchanting and heartbreaking voice of teenager Greg' Anna JamesMiss Haye...

  • Grace synopsis, comments

    Grace

    Calvin Baker

    Harper Roland has abandoned his job as a war correspondent, and returned home a weary, jaded 37yearold. Uncertain of the future but determined to move forward with his life, he beg...

  • Their Dogs Came with Them synopsis, comments

    Their Dogs Came with Them

    Helena Maria Viramontes

    Helena Maria Viramontes brings 1960s Los Angeles to life with “terse, energetic, and vivid” (Publishers Weekly) prose in this story of a group of young Latinx women fighting to sur...

  • The Penguin Book of Migration Literature synopsis, comments

    The Penguin Book of Migration Literature

    Dohra Ahmad

    [Ahmad's] "introduction is fiery and charismatic... This book encompasses the diversity of experience, with beautiful variations and stories that bicker back and forth." Parul Sehg...

  • Where the Line Bleeds synopsis, comments

    Where the Line Bleeds

    Jesmyn Ward

    The first novel from National Book Award winner and author of Sing, Unburied, Sing Jesmyn Ward, a timeless Southern fable of brotherly love and familial conflict“a lyrical yet clea...

  • Fig synopsis, comments

    Fig

    Sarah Elizabeth Schantz

    An NPR Best Book of 2015Love and sacrifice intertwine in this brilliant debut of rare beauty about a girl dealing with her mother’s schizophrenia and her own mental illness.Fig’s w...

  • A Princess of Mars synopsis, comments

    A Princess of Mars

    Edgar Rice Burroughs & Junot Díaz

    Rediscover the adventurepulp classic that gave the world its first great interplanetary romancenow featuring an introduction by Junot Díaz In the spring of 1866, Joh...

  • An Ocean of Minutes synopsis, comments

    An Ocean of Minutes

    Thea Lim

    A shortlisted finalist for the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the ALA 2019 Reading List for Science Fiction“Thea Lim’s An Ocean of Minutes is that rare thinga speculative novel t...

  • The Cemetery of Untold Stories synopsis, comments

    The Cemetery of Untold Stories

    Julia Alvarez

    Literary icon Julia Alvarez, bestselling author of In the Time of the Butterflies, shares an inventive and emotional novel about storytelling and her homelandthe Dom...

  • The Gods of Tango synopsis, comments

    The Gods of Tango

    Carolina de Robertis

    February 1913: seventeenyearold Leda, clutching a suitcase and her father’s cherished violin, leaves her small Italian village for a new home (and husband) halfway across the world...

  • Telex from Cuba synopsis, comments

    Telex from Cuba

    Rachel Kushner

    Finalist for the National Book Award for FictionThe debut novel by New York Times bestselling author Rachel Kushner, called “shimmering” (The New Yorker), “multilayered and absorbi...

  • Heads of the Colored People synopsis, comments

    Heads of the Colored People

    Nafissa Thompson-Spires

    Winner of the PEN Open Book Award Winner of the Whiting Award Longlisted for the National Book Award and Aspen Words Literary Prize Nominated for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize...

  • This Is How You Lose Her synopsis, comments

    This Is How You Lose Her

    Junot Díaz

    Finalist for the 2012 National Book AwardA Time and People Top 10 Book of 2012Finalist for the 2012 Story PrizeChosen as a notable or best book of the year by&#...

  • Reading Junot Diaz synopsis, comments

    Reading Junot Diaz

    Christopher González

    Dominican American author and Pulitzer Prize–winner Junot Díaz has gained international fame for his blended, crosscultural fiction. Reading Junot Díaz is the first study to focus ...

  • The Madonnas of Echo Park synopsis, comments

    The Madonnas of Echo Park

    Brando Skyhorse

    Reminiscent of Sherman Alexie and Sandra Cisneros, acclaimed author Brando Skyhorse’s “engaging storytelling” (Vanity Fair) brings the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles to life...

  • Reinbou synopsis, comments

    Reinbou

    Pedro Cabiya & Jessica Powell

    In the Time of the Butterflies meets Woman of Light in this propulsive work of historical fiction about U.S. intervention and corruption in the Dominican Republic.The basis of the ...

  • Radical Hope synopsis, comments

    Radical Hope

    Carolina de Robertis

    Radical Hope is a collection of lettersto ancestors, to children five generations from now, to strangers in grocery lines, to any and all who feel weary and discouragedwritten by a...