Harold Washington Library
400 S State St
312.747.4300
This event has passed.
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Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
- When
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Friday Sep 12, 2008 (6pm)
- Where
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It took more than ten years, but Junot Díaz finally exceeded those huge, Drown-inspired expectations with last year's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The multi-generational tale of a cursed Dominican-American family focuses on Oscar, a morbidly obese, hopelessly romantic fanboy steeped in the nerd-dom of Tolkien, Akira, and Marvel comics. But bad luck, we learn, is simply his birthright. Carver fans should love Díaz's funny-tough voice, a hip-hop-inflected Spanglish polyglot; and Chabon devotees can dig the cultural obsessions. It's that rare treasure: a compact epic, dense with history and allusion, that constantly motors forward.
