The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
by Junot Díaz
A Dominican nerd, a family curse, and Trujillo's long shadow.
For you if
you want to understand the Dominican diaspora through the most gloriously strange novel ever written about it
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Oscar is a fat Dominican nerd in New Jersey who wants to be the next Tolkien and can't get a girlfriend. His family has been cursed since Trujillo — the fukú, the doom that follows Dominican families who ran afoul of the dictator. Díaz writes in Spanglish, footnotes, comic book references, and Caribbean history simultaneously. The dispatch that refused to choose between being literary and being popular, between being Dominican and being American, between tragedy and absurdity. National Book Critics Circle Award. One of the great American novels of the last thirty years.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Dominican Republic • Caribbean
- Voice
- Written by a Dominican author
- Themes
- coming of agediaspora
- Topics
- trujillo regime
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