Junot Diaz - Drown

Praise for DROWN by Junot Daz

There have been several noteworthy literary debuts this year, but Daz deserves to be singled out for the distinctiveness and caliber of his voice, and for his ability to sum up a range of cultural and cross-cultural experiences in a few sharp images. The motifsthe father absent and indifferent to the family, his infidelities and bullying while theyre united, the shabby disrepair of northern New Jerseyresonate from story to story and give Drown its cohesion and weight. These are powerful and convincing stories. And what is powerful in these stories isnt their cultural message, though that is strong, but a broader, more basic theme. These 10 finely achieved short stories reveal a writer who will still have something to say after he has used up his own youthful experiences and heartaches.

The Philadelphia Inquirer

Talent this big will always make noise. [The ten stories in Drown ] vividly evoke Dazs hardscrabble youth in the Dominican Republic and New Jersey, where our community was separated from all the other communities by a six-lane highway and the dump. Daz has the dispassionate eye of a journalist and the tongue of a poet

Newsweek

Junot Dazs stories are as vibrant, tough, unexotic, and beautiful as their settingsSanto Domingo, Dominican Nueva York, the immigrant neighborhoods of industrial New Jersey with their gorgeously polluted skyscapes. Places and voices new to our literature yet classically American: coming-of-age stories full of wild humor, intelligence, rage, and piercing tenderness. And this is just the beginning. Daz is going to be a giant of American prose.

Francisco Goldman

This stunning collection of stories is an unsentimental glimpse at life among immigrants from the Dominican Republicand another front-line report on the ambivalent promise of the American Dream. Daz is writing about more than physical dislocation. There is a price for leaving culture and homeland behindIn this cubistic telling, life is marked by relentless machismo, flashes of violence and severe tests of faith from loved ones. The characters are weighted down by the harshness of their circumstances, yet Daz gives his young narrators a wry sense of humor.

San Francisco Chronicle

Graceful and raw and painful and smartHis prose is sensible poetry that moves like an interesting conversationThe pages turn and all of a sudden youre done and you want more.

The Boston Globe

A stunning and kinetic first collection of short stories. Daz has the ear of a poet (a rarity among fiction writers), and many of his stories are piloted by a compelling and often fiercely observed first-person narration. Dazs precise language drives the accumulation of particular concrete sensory details to the universals of broader, nuanced experience. Comparisons to writers like Sandra Cisneros or Jess Mowry or even Edwidge Danticat (all of whom are at the top of my list) are probably inevitable, but Daz distinguishes himself thoroughly in this book. In an era of the glib, hip Ive-seen-it-all-nothing-shocks-me-anymore narrator, Daz doesnt back away from sentiment. Though he is never mawkish, his stories are richly textured in feelingDaz is a life-smart, savvy writer who, because hes honest and often funny, very gently breaks your heart.

Hungry Mind Review

New Jersey and the Dominican Republic are thousands of miles apart, but in Junot Dazs seductive collection of short stories, they seem to blend into each other as effortlessly as Daz weaves the words that bring to life the recurring characters that populate both places. In a sense, this book is about that old and much misunderstood Latino demon, machismo, which only recently is being seen as something not innate to Latino males, but rather as the result of their often futile attempts to reconcile their dual roles as men (in the eyes of their families) and as mere boys (in the eyes of the outside world). Theres a lot of artistry in this book, and where there is art, there is always hope.

Austin American-Statesman

RemarkableHis style is succinct and unadorned, yet the effect is lush and vivid, and after a few lines you are there with him, living in his documentary, his narration running through your head almost like your own thoughts. Vignettesobserved with depth and tenderness but most of all with a simple honesty that rings as clear and true as a wind chime.

The Dallas Morning News

Mesmerizingly honest, heart-breaking and full of promiseTales of life among the excluded classes of the diaspora, they tread fearlessly where lesser writers gush and politicizewhich is exactly their political and aesthetic power.

Si Magazine

Remarkable.

Entertainment Weekly

The talent is strong and individual. Dazs languageis careful and astringentpowerful and revelatory.

Houston Chronicle

A powerful writer. Daz makes no apologies.

Albuquerque Journal

JUNOT DAZ

DROWN

Riverhead Books

New York

Ysrael and Fiesta, 1980 first appeared in Story magazine. Drown and How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie first appeared in The New Yorker . Boyfriend first appeared in Time Out New York . Edison, New Jersey first appeared in The Paris Review .

Riverhead Books
Published by The Berkley Publishing Group
200 Madison Avenue
New York, New York 10016

Copyright 1996 by Junot Daz
Cover design by Lisa Amoroso
Front cover photograph by Ken Schles
Photograph of the author by Marion Ettlinger

All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Riverhead hardcover edition: August 1996
First Riverhead trade paperback edition: July 1997
Riverhead trade paperback edition ISBN: 1-4295-3387-0

The Putnam Berkley World Wide Web site address is
http://www.berkley.com/berkley

The Library of Congress has catalogued the Riverhead hardcover edition as follows:
Daz, Junot
Drown/Junot Daz.
p. cm.
ISBN 1-57322-041-8
1. Dominican RepublicSocial life and customsFiction.
New JerseySocial life and customsFiction. 3. Dominican
AmericansNew JerseyFiction. I. Title.
PS3554.I259D76 1996
813.54dc20 96-18362 CIP

Para mi madre,
Virtudes Daz

Contents

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

dont belong to English

though I belong nowhere else

Gustavo Prez Firmat

YSRAEL

We were on our way to the colmado for an errand, a beer for my to, when Rafa stood still and tilted his head, as if listening to a message I couldnt hear, something beamed in from afar. We were close to the colmado; you could hear the music and the gentle clop of drunken voices. I was nine that summer, but my brother was twelve, and he was the one who wanted to see Ysrael, who looked out towards Barbacoa and said, We should pay that kid a visit.

Mami shipped me and Rafa out to the campo every summer. She worked long hours at the chocolate factory and didnt have the time or the energy to look after us during the months school was out. Rafa and I stayed with our tos, in a small wooden house just outside Ocoa; rosebushes blazed around the yard like compass points and the mango trees spread out deep blankets of shade where we could rest and play dominos, but the campo was nothing like our barrio in Santo Domingo. In the campo there was nothing to do, no one to see. You didnt get television or electricity and Rafa, who was older and expected more, woke up every morning pissy and dissatisfied. He stood out on the patio in his shorts and looked out over the mountains, at the mists that gathered like water, at the brucal trees that blazed like fires on the mountain. This, he said, is shit.