10 years later

This just in, after 10 years of hiatus, waiting, and scouring short stories collections for SOMETHING to satiate us, Junot Diaz is back!! Yes, this is no lie, read the Village Voice story. In case you didn't live in New Jersey when Diaz was heralded as a saviour, you need to look this guy up. His success in the mid-90s came for a number of reasons, a powerful new Dominican writer when there aren't many, an immigrant Jersey Boy (stories named Edison quantify this) who went to Rutgers and was blasting holes in the American Dream. The profs at Rutgers found anyway imaginable to squeeze his stories into the curriculum, no matter what the department. His prose then was lean, angry, and dirrrty. The kinda stuff that would seep onto the page like acid. One friend whom I made read Drown felt like she needed to take a shower afterwards. But it wasn't a dark book, just gritty and realistic, and blunt. I really love Drown, it is one of the few short story collections I've read and reread for the last 8 years. Now there is finally new material from Mr. Diaz. I haven't read the new book, and when I do I'll review it here. If you don't know about Junot, get his new book, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, or find Drown at your library and read it now!!