Díaz, Junot
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author, Editor.
(1968- ) Dominican-born author and academic, in the US from 1974; he writes in English, initially as an author of stripped-down non-fantastic tales beginning with "Ysrael" (Autumn 1995 Story), some of which were assembled in Drown (coll 1996). He is of sf interest for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (20 December 2000 The New Yorker; much exp 2007), a radically Equipoisal edifice of story whose narrator, Yunior de Las Casas – an alter ego of the author who here calls himself the Watcher (after the enigmatic observer in the Marvel Comics sf comic, The Fantastic Four) – uses the language and estrangements of Genre SF to represent (among other functions) the inability of "realistic" languages and tropes to describe the twenty-first century world. Only sf – and other linked genres which John Clute has grouped together for convenience as examples of fantastika – can directly address the description of our world. The story itself, which recounts the savage history of the Dominican Republic under Trujillo and the short life of the eponymous Oscar, is not fantastic, though the events (and abilities) depicted are similar to the supernatural transgressiveness of Salman Rushdie's earlier novels.
Díaz has also edited the Dystopian anthology Global Dystopias (anth 2017). [JC]
see also: Slipstream.
Junot Díaz
born Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic: 31 December 1968
works
- Drown (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996) [coll: hb/Lisa Amoroso]
- The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (New York: Riverhead Books, 2007) [hb/Rodrigo Corral]
- This Is How You Lose Her (New York: Riverhead Books, 2012) [coll: pb/Rodrigo Corral]
works as editor
- Global Dystopias (Boston, Massachusetts: Boston Review, 2017) [anth: comprising a special issue of the Boston Review: pb/]
links
previous versions of this entry