This Is How You Lose Her: Summary and book reviews of This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz, plus links to an excerpt from This Is How You Lose Her and a biography of Junot Diaz.
This Is How You Lose Her
by Junot Diaz
Hardcover: Sep 2012,
224 pages.
Junot Díaz burst into the literary world with Drown, a collection of indelible stories that revealed a major new writer with the "eye of a journalist and the tongue of a poet" (Newsweek). His eagerly awaited first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, arrived like a thunderclap, topping best-of-the-year lists and winning a host of major awards, including the Pulitzer Prize. Now Díaz turns his prodigious talent to the haunting, impossible power of love.
The stories in This Is How You Lose Her, by turns hilarious and devastating, raucous and tender, lay bare the infinite longing and inevitable weaknesses of our all-too-human hearts. They capture the heat of new passion, the recklessness with which we betray what we most treasure, and the torture we go through - "the begging, the crawling over glass, the crying" - to try to mend what we've broken beyond repair. They recall the echoes that intimacy leaves behind, even where we thought we did not care. They teach us the catechism of affections: that the faithlessness of the fathers is visited upon the children; that what we do unto our exes is inevitably done in turn unto us; and that loving thy neighbor as thyself is a commandment more safely honored on platonic than erotic terms. Most of all, these stories remind us that the habit of passion always triumphs over experience, and that "love, when it hits us for real, has a half-life of forever."
...[I]t is to Díaz's enormous credit that Yunior and his coterie are so human, so absolutely lovable that you forgive their misdeeds. These are not people you might run into everyday, but Díaz's expert touch makes them pop and come alive. Great literature transcends plot and gives us a peek into the human condition. That is precisely what Díaz achieves to dazzling effect. He uses these broken love stories as the medium through which he addresses weightier themes. (Reviewed by Poornima Apte).
O Magazine
Exhibits the potent blend of literary eloquence and street cred that earned him a Pulizer Prize... Diaz's prose is vulgar, brave, and poetic.
Kirkus Reviews
Not as ambitious as Díaz's Pulitzer Prize winner, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), but sharply observed and morally challenging.
Publisher's Weekly
Starred Review. Raw and honest, these stories pulsate with raspy ghetto hip-hop and the subtler yet more vital echo of the human heart.
Library Journal
Starred Review. Díaz's third book is as stunning as its predecessors. These stories are hard and sad, but in Díaz's hands they also crackle.
Junot Díaz's characters have a strong link back to their home country, the Dominican Republic, as they make northern New Jersey (aka North Jersey) their new home. These Dominican-American communities have a strong presence in Díaz's writing, even if specific cities or neighborhoods are not always referred to by name. Due to the same socio-economic factors that affect his characters - the jobs they find, the homes they live in - the real-life demographics of New Jersey are starting to shift.
According to an article in the New York Times that reported statistics from the 2010 US Census, the non-Hispanic white population in the state decreased by over 300,000 to approximately 5.2 million, which researcher Tim Evans says is remarkable: "these are pretty astounding changes. It's another sign that New Jersey is on a similar path to California...
From the best-selling author of The Dew Breaker, a major work of nonfiction: a powerfully moving family story that centers around the men closest to Danticat's heart - her father, Mira, and his older brother, Joseph.
On the verge of giving up—anchored to dreams that never came true and to people who have long since disappeared from their lives—Van Booy's characters walk the streets of these stark and beautiful stories until chance meetings with strangers force them to face responsibility for lives they thought had continued on without them.
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Kirkus Reviews
According to an article in the New York Times that reported statistics from the 2010 US Census, the non-Hispanic white population in the state decreased by over 300,000 to approximately 5.2 million, which researcher Tim Evans says is remarkable: "these are pretty astounding changes. It's another sign that New Jersey is on a similar path to California...
