Drown (short story collection)

Drown is the debut short story collection from Dominican-American author Junot Díaz and was published by Riverhead Books in 1996.

It precedes his novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the short story collection This Is How You Lose Her. Drown is dedicated to his mother, Virtudes Díaz.

Drown

First edition cover image
Author Junot Díaz
Country United States of America
Language English
Genre Fiction, Short story collection
Publisher Riverhead Books
Publication date
1996
Media type Print (Hardcover)
Pages 208
ISBN 1-57322-606-8

Background

Díaz attended Kean College in Union, New Jersey for one year before transferring and ultimately completing his B.A. at Rutgers University in 1992. Yunior would become central to much of Díaz's work and Díaz would later explain: "My idea, ever since Drown, was to write six or seven books about him that would form one big novel." [1] He earned his MFA from Cornell University in 1995, where he wrote most of his first collection of short stories.

As David Gates wrote in his The New York Times review of Drown: "In five of these ten stories, his narrator is young Ramon de las Casas, called Yunior, whose father abandons his wife and children for years before returning to the Dominican Republic and bringing them back with him to New Jersey. In other stories, the nameless tellers may or may not be Yunior, but they're all young Latino men with the same well-defended sensitivity, uneasy relations with women and obsessive watchfulness."[2]

Stories

Epigraph of Drown

The fact that I
am writing to you
in English
already falsifies what I
wanted to tell you.
My subject:
how to explain to you that I
don't belong to English
though I belong nowhere else

Gustavo Pérez Firmat

Reception

Gates writes of Díaz's characters: "Mainstream American literature from William Bradford to Toni Morrison has always been obsessed with outsiders; its Hucks and Holdens are forever duking it out with the King's English, and writers as different as Ezra Pound, Zora Neale Hurston and Donald Barthelme have delighted in defiling the pure well with highbrow imports, nonstandard vernacular and Rube Goldberg coinages. Despite his professed discomfort, Mr. Díaz is smart enough to play his hand for all it's worth." He also compares Díaz to Raymond Carver, writing: "Mr. Diaz transfigures disorder and disorientation with a rigorous sense of form. He whips story after story into shape by setting up parallel scenes."[3]

The San Francisco Chronicle described Drown: "This stunning collection of stories offers an unsentimental glimpse of life among the immigrants from the Dominican Republic—and other front-line reports on the ambivalent promise of the American dream—by an eloquent and original writer who describes more than physical dislocation in conveying the price that is paid for leaving culture and homeland behind."

References

  1. Scarano, Ross. "Interview: Junot Díaz Talks Dying Art, the Line Between Fact and Fiction, and What Scares Him Most". Complex. Retrieved 16 May 2014.
  2. Gates, David. "English Lessons". The New York Times. Retrieved 16 May 2014.
  3. Gates, David. "English Lessons". The New York Times. Retrieved 16 May 2014.
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