{"product_id":"the-brief-wondrous-life-of-oscar-wao-pulitzer-prize-winner-isbn-9781594489587","title":"The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Pulitzer Prize Winner)","description":"\u003cb\u003eWinner of:\u003cbr\u003eThe Pulitzer Prize\u003cbr\u003eThe National Book Critics Circle Award\u003cbr\u003eThe Anisfield-Wolf Book Award\u003cbr\u003eThe Jon Sargent, Sr. First Novel Prize\u003cbr\u003eA \u003ci\u003eTime\u003c\/i\u003e Magazine #1 Fiction Book of the Year\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eOne of \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eOne of the best books of 2007 according to: \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eSan Francisco Chronicle, New York Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, People, The Village Voice, Time Out New York, Salon, Baltimore City Paper, The Christian Science Monitor, Booklist, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, \u003c\/i\u003eNew York Public Library, and many more...\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eNominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s \u003ci\u003eThe Great American Read\u003c\/i\u003e and named one of \u003ci\u003eThe Atlantic\u003c\/i\u003e’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd who—from the New Jersey home he shares with his old world mother and rebellious sister—dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, finding love. But Oscar may never get what he wants. Blame the fukú—a curse that has haunted Oscar’s family for generations, following them on their epic journey from Santo Domingo to the USA. Encapsulating Dominican-American history, \u003ci\u003eThe Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao\u003c\/i\u003e opens our eyes to an astonishing vision of the contemporary American experience and explores the endless human capacity to persevere—and risk it all—in the name of love.\"An extraordinarily vibrant book that's fueled by adrenaline-powered prose. . . A book that decisively establishes [Díaz] as one of contemporary fiction's most distinctive and irresistible new voices.\"\u003cb\u003e —\u003c\/b\u003eMichiko Kakutani, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Díaz finds a miraculous balance. He cuts his barn-burning comic-book plots (escape, ruin, redemption) with honest, messy realism, and his narrator speaks in a dazzling hash of Spanish, English, slang, literary flourishes, and pure virginal dorkiness.\" —\u003ci\u003eNew York Magazine\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"Genius. . . a story of the American experience that is giddily glorious and hauntingly horrific. And what a voice Yunior has. His narration is a triumph of style and wit, moving along Oscar de Leon's story with cracking, down-low humor, and at times expertly stunning us with heart-stabbing sentences. That Díaz's novel is also full of ideas, that [the narrator's] brilliant talking rivals the monologues of Roth's Zuckerman\u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003ein short, that what he has produced is a kick-ass (and truly, that is just the word for it) work of modern fiction\u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003eall make \u003ci\u003eThe Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao\u003c\/i\u003e something exceedingly rare: a book in which a new America can recognize itself, but so can everyone else.\" —\u003ci\u003eSan Francisco Chronicle\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Astoundingly great. . . Díaz has written. . . a mixture of straight-up English, Dominican Spanish, and hieratic nerdspeak crowded with references to Tolkien, DC Comics, role-playing games, and classic science fiction. . . In lesser hands \u003ci\u003eOscar Wao\u003c\/i\u003e would merely have been the saddest book of the year. With Díaz on the mike, it's also the funniest.\" \u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003eTime \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"Superb, deliciously casual and vibrant, shot through with wit and insight. The great achievement of \u003ci\u003eThe Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao\u003c\/i\u003e is Díaz's ability to balance an intimate multigenerational story of familial tragedy. . . The past and present remain equally in focus, equally immediate, and Díaz's acrobatic prose toggles artfully between realities, keeping us enthralled with all.\" —\u003ci\u003eThe Boston Globe\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"Panoramic and yet achingly personal. It's impossible to categorize, which is a good thing. There's the epic novel, the domestic novel, the social novel, the historical novel, and the 'language' novel. People talk about the Great American Novel and the immigrant novel. Pretty reductive. Díaz's novel is a hell of a book. It doesn't care about categories. It's densely populated; it's obsessed with language. It's Dominican and American, not about immigration but diaspora, in which one family's dramas are entwined with a nation's, not about history as information but as dark-force destroyer. Really, it's a love novel. . . His dazzling wordplay is impressive. But by the end, it is his tenderness and loyalty and melancholy that breaks the heart. That is wondrous in itself.\" —\u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Díaz's writing is unruly, manic, seductive. . . In Díaz's landscape we are all the same, victims of a history and a present that doesn't just bleed together but stew. Often in hilarity. Mostly in heartbreak.\" —\u003ci\u003eEsquire\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003c\/i\u003eThe Dominican Republic [Díaz] portrays in \u003ci\u003eThe Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao\u003c\/i\u003e is a wild, beautiful, dangerous, and contradictory place, both hopelessly impoverished and impossibly rich. Not so different, perhaps, from anyone else's ancestral homeland, but Díaz's weirdly wonderful novel illustrates the island's uniquely powerful hold on Dominicans wherever they may wander. Díaz made us wait eleven years for this first novel and \u003ci\u003eboom!—\u003c\/i\u003eit's over just like that. It's not a bad gambit, to always leave your audience wanting more. So brief and wondrous, this life of Oscar. Wow.\" —\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post Book World\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"Terrific. . . High-energy. . . It is a joy to read, and every bit as exhilarating to reread.\" —\u003ci\u003eEntertainment Weekly\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e \"Now that Díaz's second book, a novel called \u003ci\u003eThe Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao\u003c\/i\u003e, has finally arrived, younger writers will find that the bar. And some older writers—we know who we are—might want to think about stepping up their game. \u003ci\u003eOscar Wao\u003c\/i\u003e shows a novelist engaged with the culture, high and low, and its polyglot language. If Donald Barthelme had lived to read Díaz, he surely would have been delighted to discover an intellectual and linguistic omnivore who could have taught even him a move or two.\" —\u003ci\u003eNewsweek\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Few books require a 'highly flammable' warning, but \u003ci\u003eThe Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, \u003c\/i\u003eJunot Díaz's long-awaited first novel, will burn its way into your heart and sizzle your senses. Díaz's novel is drenched in the heated rhythms of the real world as much as it is laced with magical realism and classic fantasy stories.\" —\u003ci\u003eUSA Today\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"Dark and exuberant. . . this fierce, funny, tragic book is just what a reader would have hoped for in a novel by Junot Díaz.\" —\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eJunot Díaz \u003c\/b\u003ewas born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey. He is the author of the critically acclaimed \u003ci\u003eDrown\u003c\/i\u003e; \u003ci\u003eThe Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao\u003c\/i\u003e, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award;  \u003ci\u003eThis Is How You Lose Her\u003c\/i\u003e, a \u003ci\u003eNew York Times \u003c\/i\u003ebestseller and National Book Award finalist; and a debut picture book, \u003ci\u003eIslandborn.\u003c\/i\u003e He is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, PEN\/Malamud Award, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and PEN\/O. Henry Award. A graduate of Rutgers College, Díaz is currently the fiction editor at \u003ci\u003eBoston Review \u003c\/i\u003eand the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.","brand":"Riverhead Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48233634431205,"sku":"NP9781594489587","price":28.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781594489587.jpg?v=1767738534","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-brief-wondrous-life-of-oscar-wao-pulitzer-prize-winner-isbn-9781594489587","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}