The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Junot Díaz, 2007
Fantasy Contemporary fictionLiterary fiction
A Dominican-American nerd's search for love and belonging, told with footnotes, comic-book obsession and a family curse that spans generations.
Feels like longing, melancholy and humor. About identity, family and love.
A page from the book
What if a curse arrived in the Caribbean on the screams of the enslaved?
They say it came first from Africa, carried on the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles. Junot Díaz.Díaz was born in the Dominican Republic in 1968 and immigrated to New Jersey at six; The Brief Wondrous Life won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2008.
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Questions readers ask
- What is The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao like?
- Feels like longing, melancholy and humor. About identity, family and love.
- What should I read after The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao?
- If you liked The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, try The Ex Hex (Erin Sterling), Carry On (Rainbow Rowell) and The Seven Year Slip (Ashley Poston).
A taste of the feed
The kiss that makes the years before it feel like sleep.
What Rhys knew was that kissing her had felt like waking up. Like he’d been drifting sleepily through everything for the past nine years until he tasted her mouth again and remembered what actually being alive felt like. Better than any magic, Vivienne’s kiss.
The Ex Hex · Erin Sterling
What it sounds like to be chosen by someone who knows you.
He’s still looking in my eyes. Staring me down like he did that dragon, chin tilted and locked. "I’m not the Chosen One," he says. I meet his gaze and sneer. My arm is a steel band around his waist. "I choose you," I say. "Simon Snow, I choose you.
Carry On · Rainbow Rowell
Some people are simply at home in the world. The rest of us watch them.
It must have worked for her, because it never mattered where she was in the world, she was home. She waltzed through life like she belonged at every party she was never invited to, fell in love with every lonely heart she found, and found luck in every adventure. She had that air about her-tourists asked her for directions when she went abroad, servers asked her opinion on wines and fine whiskeys, celebrities asked her about her life.
The Seven Year Slip · Ashley Poston
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