![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Díaz planned it, he now says, as "neither a novel nor a story collection, but something a little more hybrid, a little more creolised". ![]() And this was how its author wanted things to be. Yet Díaz, who was born in Santo Domingo in 1968, and moved to the US aged six, evidently had more complicated feelings about what it might mean to be an American, writing as he did in the shadow of an old country that's part of the New World too.Īlong with his use of Dominican slang in his punchy American-English sentences, all this made Drown a hard book to pigeonhole. It could also be seen as belonging to the efflorescence of tough, post- "minimalist" American stories as produced by such figures as Thom Jones and Denis Johnson. Some reviewers saw it as being close to reportage, others as a fragmentary autobiographical novel. Although it was laid out as a story collection, Drown wasn't billed as such by its publishers. But there was less agreement about what kind of writer Díaz was. When first published, it was widely seen as marking the arrival of a young writer to be reckoned with. Junot Díaz's first book, Drown (1996), detailed the lives of children in the Dominican Republic and, later, of young men and their difficult parents in New Jersey's immigrant ghettoes. ![]()
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