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“From the bottom will the genius come that makes our ability to live with each other possible. I believe that with all my heart.” These are the words of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Dominican-American writer Junot Díaz. His hope is fiercely reality-based, a product of centuries lodged in his body of African-Caribbean suffering, survival, and genius.

At Home in Global America: Junot Diaz, Part I They say it came first from Africa, carried in 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. Fuku americanus, or more colloquially, fuku — generally a curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and Doom of the New World…No matter what it’s name or provenance, it is believed that the arrival of the Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed the fuku on the world, and we’ve all been in the shit ever since. Santo Domingo might be fuku’s Kilometer Zero, its port of entry, but we are all of us its children, whether we know it or not. Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao For people who feed on fiction for tastes of truth in our time, Junot Diaz is a treasure. A double-visioned outsider in two languages, two cultures and two countries, he begins to look like the anointed prince of a generation of young immigrants writing “global” fiction inside the US. Could Juno Diaz be our Joseph Conrad? The roaring liftoff of his first novel,The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao may even be an omen. Are we prepared to hear upstart fictionists tell us, as Junot Diaz does, at the outset: “Santo Domingo was Iraq before Iraq was Iraq.” Diaz’s young Dominican narrator decries the erasure of public memory: “You didn’t know we were occupied twice in the twentieth century? Don’t worry, when you have kids they won’t know the U.S. occupied Iraq either.”Underlying what reviewers are calling a comic novel, these are the tough themes: the interplay of political and sexual brutality, the suppression of national and family histories, and an inter-generational repetition compulsion around ancient cruelties that are suffered and re-suffered if not exactly remembered.Junot Diaz makes you wonder, among other things: where were the eminent post-imperial writers (in the class of Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondatje, Zadie Smith) as the U.S. staggered backward into our own neo-imperial misadventure? Might somebody have warned us?In the next few weeks, we’re reading and interviewing also Ha Jin, the Chinese exile who has just published his first “American” novel, and the novelist and memoirist Edwidge Danticat, who speaks for Haiti and Brooklyn much as Junot Diaz voices Dominican lives from the New Jersey corridor to Santo Domingo, and often back, and back again.The premise, of course, is that fiction writers may tell us a lot more than we learned from Congressional struggles with immigration reform about the new diasporas and hybrid identities; what seems a permanent floating migration culture; such things as Junot Diaz calls “a peculiarly Jersey malaise — the inextinguishable longing for elsewheres.”Michiko Kakutani’s celebration in the New York Times noted the “madcap, magpie voice” of Diaz’s “funny, street-smart” narrator, in the “comic portrait of a second-generation Dominican geek,” the eponymous Oscar Wao. But as she, too, noted, the story and the history behind it are harrowing.My conversation with Juno Diaz began with the American reader’s shock of non-recognition in his Dominican Republic, Siamese-twinned with Haiti on the eastern portion of Hispaniola, Europe’s original prize sugar colony. We Red Sox and Mets fans know next to nothing of the homeland of Pedro Martinez, Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz, and it feels a little scandalous. We call the D. R. the “Republic of Baseball” and know it as Rush Limbaugh’s Viagra-charged Fantasy Island. But the social history and the present poverty? The Hitlerian dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo from 1930 to 1961? The official massacre of many thousands of Haitians in 1937?Junot Diaz says that the kids wearing MLB caps in Santo Domingo today might have as hard a time profiling Trujillo as I did. “We seem to be built to forget,” Diaz says. We seem to insist on “illusions of purity… coherence… goodness… of the pure present without the shadow of history.” But when we cannot summon our history, neither can we imagine consequences of the present. “This book’s central preoccupation is: consequences.”Click to listen to Part I of the conversation with Junot Diaz( MB MP3)Continue the conversation with Junot Diaz in Part II and Part III. Thank you, Junot. We are up for Edwidge Danticat at Brown University next Tuesday. Help me out, Open Sorcerers, with angles and questions, please. http://radioopensource.org/at-home-and-global-in-america-junot-diaz/

Junot Diaz talks to Paul Holdengraber about death, pain, the joys of teaching, and the magic of the library. For more, visit LitHub.com. === Original video: https://soundcloud.com/lithub/apcfp-e25-junot-diaz Downloaded by http://huffduff-video.snarfed.org/ on Fri, 04 Nov 2016 03:21:21 GMT Available for 30 days after download

The author delves into the stereotype of Caribbean male promiscuity http://www.cbc.ca/radio/outintheopen/out-in-the-open-on-june-25-2016-belonging-1.3646223/writing-about-the-male-slut-the-role-of-masculinity-in-junot-diaz-s-work-1.3651588

We can probably all agree that it’s a little premature, but all the same, the BBC has barreled ahead with its list of “The 21st Century’s 12 greatest novels.” Topping the list of excellent, if not especially surprising, picks is The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning debut novel about, as he puts it in the interview above, “a closeted nerd writing about an absolutely out nerd, and using their shared mutual language to tell the story.” The book has connected with such a wide swath of readers for more than its appeal to fellow nerds, though that’s no small thing. A great many readers have seen their own lives reflected in Díaz’s characters—Dominican immigrants growing up in New Jersey—or have found their experiences illuminating. And even though Yunior and Oscar’s very male point of view might have alienated female readers in the hands of a lesser author, Díaz has the sensitivity and self-awareness to—as Joe Fassler argues in The Atlantic—write sexist characters, but not sexist books. As the author himself says above, “if it wasn’t for women readers, I wouldn’t have a career.” Díaz’s ear for dialogue and idiom and his facility for constructing completely believable characters with completely distinctive voices are matched by his commitment to representing the experiences of people who still get routinely left out of the contemporary canon. Despite the attention given to such stellar non-white, non-male writers as Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong-Kingston, Arundhati Roy, and Jamaica Kincaid, most MFA programs, Diaz argued in a recent essay for The New Yorker, are still “too white,” reproducing “exactly the dominant culture’s blind spots and assumptions around race and racism (and sexism and heteronormativity, etc).” In his own MFA workshop experiences at Cornell, he found that “the default subject position of reading and writing—of Literature with a capital L—was white, straight and male.” The problem is more than just personal, though he certainly found the experience personally alienating, and it isn’t a matter of redressing historical wrongs or enforcing an abstract PC notion of diversity. Instead, as Díaz told Salon, it’s a problem of accurately representing reality. “If race or gender (or any other important social force) are not part of your interpretive logic—if they’re not part of what you consider the real—then you’re leaving out most of what has made our world our world.” In his own role at a professor at MIT, teaching undergraduate writing courses for the Comparative Media Studies/Writing Department, Díaz is very thoughtful about his approach, emphasizing, “it’s not the books you teach, but how you teach them.” In addition to novels by authors like Haitian-born Edwidge Danticat and Zimbabwean author NoViolet Bulawayo, he has his students read “classic Gothic texts which are themselves not very diverse by our standards,” but, he says, “critical lens I deploy helps my students understand how issues of race, gender, coloniality etc. are never far.” Salon tracked down the syllabi and reading lists for two of Díaz’s MIT courses, “World-Building” and “Advanced Fiction.” We do find one classic Gothic text—Bram Stoker’s Dracula—and also much of what we might expect from the self-confessed nerd, including work from such well-regarded comic writers as Frank Miller and Alan Moore and classic sci-fi from Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs. In addition to these white, male writers, we have fiction from African-American sci-fi authors Octavia Butler and N.K. Jemisin. Díaz’s “Advanced Fiction” list is even more wide-ranging, inclusive of writers from Chile, Zimbabwe, China, and Haiti, as well as the U.S. See both lists below. World-Building: Description: “This class concerns the design and analysis of imaginary (or constructed) worlds for narrative media such as roleplaying games, films, comics, videogames and literary texts. … The class’ primary goal is to help participants create better imaginary worlds – ultimately all our efforts should serve that higher purpose.” Prerequisites: “You will need to have seen Star Wars (episode four: A New Hope) and read The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien.” Reading List: “A Princess of Mars” by ER Burroughs “Dracula” by Bram Stoker “Batman: The Dark Knight Returns” by Frank Miller “Sunshine” by Robin McKinley “V for Vendetta” by Alan Moore “The Hunger Games” by Suzanne Collins “The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms” by NK Jemisin “Lilith’s Brood” by Octavia Butler “Perdido Street Station” by China Miéville “Snow Crash” by Neal Stephenson (Recommended) Some things to consider always when taking on a new world: What are its primary features—spatial, cultural, biological, fantastic, cosmological? What is the world’s ethos (the guiding beliefs or ideals that characterize the world)? What are the precise strategies that are used by its creator to convey the world to us and us to the world? How are our characters connected to the world? And how are we the viewer or reader or player connected to the world? Advanced Fiction Description: “An advanced workshop on the writing and critiquing of prose.” Reading List: “Clara” by Roberto Bolaño “Hitting Budapest” by NoViolet Bulawayo “Whites” by Julie Otsuka “Ghosts” by Edwidge Danticat “My Good Man” by Eric Gansworth “Gold Boy, Emerald Girl” by Yiyun Li “Bounty” by George Saunders For more from Díaz himself on his approach to writing fiction, listen to his interview with NPR’s Teri Gross. And just below, hear Díaz read from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao at the Key West Literary Seminar in 2008. via Color Lines Related Content: Free Online Literature Courses Junot Díaz Annotates a Selection of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao for “Poetry Genius” David Foster Wallace’s 1994 Syllabus: How to Teach Serious Literature with Lightweight Books W.H. Auden’s 1941 Literature Syllabus Asks Students to Read 32 Great Works, Covering 6000 Pages Lynda Barry’s Wonderfully Illustrated Syllabus & Homework Assignments from Her UW-Madison Class, “The Unthinkable Mind” Donald Barthelme’s Syllabus Highlights 81 Books Essential for a Literary Education Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness. http://www.openculture.com/2015/02/junot-diazs-syllabi-for-his-mit-writing-classes.html

Junot Diaz has a book of short stories out now in paperback. It’s called ‘This Is How You Lose Her.’ Junot’s book is new, but the protagonist Yunior isn’t. This is the third time the Pulitzer Prize-winning author has written about him. Is Yunior just an alter-ego for Diaz? Jesse will ask. Then, we revisit Jesse’s interview with the actress Carrie Fisher. She’ll talk about what it's like to play one of the most recognizable characters in movie history. Later in life, Fisher was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and then treated it with electroshock therapy. She’ll talk about what that was like, too. Plus, the hosts of My Brother My Brother and Me answer listeners’ pressing pop culture problems; Ian Cohen introduces us to a couple of great new heavy records; and in the wake of The Accidental Racist, Jesse will tell you about a record that mixed country and hip-hop to the benefit of both. http://tsoya.libsyn.com/junot-diaz-and-carrie-fisher

Dominican-born writer Junot Diaz -- the MacArthur genius, Pulitzer Prize-winning author has written some of some of the most brilliant contemporary fiction about the immigrant experience.  http://www.ttbook.org/book/our-minds-junot-diaz

Our August Book Club selection is Junot Diaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Junot Diaz burst onto the literary scene with "Drown," a collection of short stories voiced by Yunior, a tough-talking Latino struggling to make his way on the streets of New Jersey. Diaz has revived Yunior for his latest book, "This Is How You Lose Her." Only this time, Yunior is juggling multiple women, and figuring out how to be faithful to his fiancee. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author joins us to talk about the book, and what it takes to be faithful. http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201209141000

The Dominican-American writer Junot Diaz got everybody’s attention, and a Pulitzer Prize, with his fierce, funny, tragic first novel “The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” Now, in a big new essay, Diaz has moved on to bigger themes — like apocalypse and the fate of the human race. Junot Diaz looks at our recent headlines of earthquakes, tsunamis, meltdown fears, and floods and sees revelation. Not of the hand of God, exactly. But of human realities running amok. We avert our eyes, he says. But these disasters must be read. This hour, On Point: Junot Diaz, on revelation and apocalypse. http://onpoint.wbur.org/2011/05/18/junot-diaz

Junot Diaz reads Edwidge Danticat's "Water Child."