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Drown [Junot Díaz] on leondumoulin.nl Have one to sell? These 10 finely achieved short stories reveal a writer who will still have something to say after he has.
Table of contents

I was known among the story-writing nerds and the MFA types and the New Yorker crowd whoever they are and in certain sectors of the Dominican community, but that was about it. Still, even that little bit of "fame" was a lot for an anonymous immigrant kid from central Jersey who'd worked his way through school. As for its real effects: I sure wasn't ready for that kind of attention by which I mean any kind , so after the book was published I found myself withdrawing deeper into my core of friends most from childhood , into my students, into my work.

I was and am super-self-conscious, but Drown made me even more so. Don't know why. But my God: I've seen the world because of my writing, and met the most extraordinary people. Drown has given me a contemplative life and allowed me to support the causes I am most passionate about, and help other writers and shine light on a minute fraction of the New Jersey Dominican experience. It's been a source of joy in spite of my discomforts, and that's the way of most good things, I suppose.

Drown (Short Story) Summary & Study Guide

Why do you think people responded so strongly to that story collection, and still remember and talk about it? Man, even my publisher calls my first book a short-story collection! Okay, for the record: Since its inception, Drown was neither a novel nor a story collection, but something a little more hybrid, a little more creolized. Which was why we didn't put "Stories" or "A Novel" on the cover. Okay, enough about my categorical anxieties Regarding your question: I've been really fortunate.


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Drown is one of those little-known books that stays in print because a sector of folks just seems to like it. Could I say anything more immodest? Just watch! To an extent it's been popular with teachers, with students, with lit heads, with readers, all kind of folks, really. Young writers like it because it's structurally instructive and also because its emotional honesty seems like something worth aiming for, surpassing.

Books similar to Drown

In Drown , I wanted - in a fictional way - to bear witness to the experience of one family in the Dominican Diaspora, one American family, in every meaning of the word, and when you try superhard, as an artist, as a historian, as a storyteller, as a human being, to bear witness, when you throw your heart into that effort, people if you're in the right place at the right time tend to respond. Okay, maybe it's all luck.

Still, I'm happy that Drown continues to move people. It makes all the years of silence and solitude worth it. Why did you wait eleven years to publish a second book, which is also your first novel?

Related essays

Were you concerned about living up to the critical and popular success of Drown? I wish I could have written four, five books in the span of those years. Just couldn't do it.

Drown Summary

Didn't help that the novel I was trying to write at the start of that period was about the destruction of New York City by a psychic terrorist my very own Third World Akira Had to rethink the whole thing, was too busy experiencing the transformations in-country to write about them in an interesting way.

I still have parts of that novel on my desk, and it's wild, watching Heroes , to see how common our apocalyptic nightmares are New York City gets killed by a superhuman in that story too , and also how compelling. But it was more than just being sideswiped by history. Other stuff. Being scared, for sure. I can put the pressure on myself like nobody's business. Years of depression didn't help if you'd grown up in my family you would have been depressed too.

My own struggle against myself. Here's another theory, which the writer David Mura told me: You have to become the person you need to be in order to write your book. I guess it just took me ten or so years to become that person. This is a novel that was born after the death of my Black Akira novel. I'd gotten a Guggenheim thank you, John Simon! Trying to write, trying to clear my head, trying to improve my Spanish. I lived next door to my friend and the greatest writer alive, Francisco Goldman, and we had all these adventures, spent many a night getting into trouble in the big bad Distrito Federal.

I remember dashing the first part out in a couple of weeks. I thought it was a story, nothing more. But Oscar wouldn't stop hanging out in my head, and I realized that I wanted to write an entire novel about a Dominican kid who doesn't get the girls, who can't dance, who is the opposite of all the stereotypes that we inside the Dominican community have about "our men. But the real challenge was in trying to create a voice, a narrative, that would allow me to talk about Zardoz and the dictatorship of Trujillo and '80s urban hip-hop and Broca and the Diaspora Dominicana and E.

Drown by Junot Díaz, Paperback | Barnes & Noble®

Maybe for you that wouldn't be nada, but for me it was a challenge and a half. I wanted a narrative that could be top-level hilarious and top-level heartbreaking. I wanted a narrative that could be hip about the present yet also render the past not as something dead or shackled inside sepia tones but as something dynamic, with all its confusions, excitements, disappointments, and energies intact. And finally there was this very brainy interest I had in these weird and in my opinion reductive arguments in Latin American letters between the forces of Macondo and McOndo.

The short version is that Force McOndo claims that the "New Latin America" cannot be usefully described by the traditional magic realist literatures of the Boom Force Macondo.

Essentials

One movement seeking to displace another. And me, I'm thinking, like a Caribbean, why can't we have 'em both simultaneously? So this book was an attempt to put Macondo and McOndo on the same page, in the same sentence, sort of to prove that you can't write the American experience, our American experience, by banning one set of passports in the process of privileging another.

I have one Cuban friend who's into H. Lovecraft like crazy and another who's convinced that the ancestors and the orishas speak to all of us. In the DR you could be watching the Red Sox on satellite one minute and then hear a ghost story the next. In my opinion, if you really want to get close to describing what's happening in the New World, what's happened, you're going to need it all. Every narrative strand you can muster. Every genre and convention. A celestial mongoose?

Legends of Bilgewater: Pyke, the Drowned Man - Audio Drama (Part 5 of 6)

A heroin-addicted stripper-dating uncle? I'll take 'em both. It's about the Dominican version of the cursed House of Atreus. And it's about this young nerd, Oscar, who risks his whole life on the chance of finding love. It's also about New Jersey and about Rutgers and about a crazy dictator and about cheating-dog men and how none of the hot women I grew up with wanted anything to do with dudes like Oscar. And it's about the foundational women in Oscar's life: his mother and his sister.

How autobiographical is it? More specifically, who is Oscar to you? And Yunior, your main narrator, whose identity is concealed until halfway through the book, who is he? Well, I was hoping that this book was crazy enough that no one would ask me if it was autobiographical. I have as yet not encountered a celestial guardian mongoose, but I did grow up Dominican in New Jersey. That aside, I certainly wasn't Oscar, and Oscar certainly isn't me. But like Oscar I loved to read sci-fi and fantasy and horror and pulps growing up.

My escape from my father and my neighborhood. In Drown , you gave us a world seen mainly through the eyes of young, macho, intellectual Latino men, who hadn't been heard from very much in literature. But in your novel, you get inside the heads of not only different types of men, but also some very strong women, from three generations. Women are in some sense the heart of the novel. In one chapter you write in the voice of Oscar's sexy sister, and your take on the life of his mother is quite tender and compassionate.

Did you make a conscious decision to write from a female point of view, or did it arise naturally? Do you see this as part of your development as a writer and a person? I knew this novel would live or die on its female characters. If the women Oscar falls for ring false, then Oscar's loves would ring false, and if that happened, well, I might as well have given up the whole damn thing.