The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

Junot Díaz

Penguin, Sep 6, 2007 - Fiction - 352 pages

Winner of:
The Pulitzer Prize
The National Book Critics Circle Award
The Anisfield-Wolf Book Award
The Jon Sargent, Sr. First Novel Prize
A Time Magazine #1 Fiction Book of the Year

One of the best books of 2007 according to: The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, People, The Village Voice, Time Out New York, Salon, Baltimore City Paper, The Christian Science Monitor, Booklist, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, New York Public Library, and many more...

Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read

Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight, lovesick Dominican ghetto nerd. From his home in New Jersey, where he lives with his old-world mother and rebellious sister, Oscar dreams of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But he may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fukú—the curse that has haunted Oscar's family for generations, dooming them to prison, torture, tragic accidents, and, above all, ill-starred love. Oscar, still waiting for his first kiss, is just its most recent victim.

Díaz immerses us in the tumultuous life of Oscar and the history of the family at large, rendering with genuine warmth and dazzling energy, humor, and insight the Dominican-American experience, and, ultimately, the endless human capacity to persevere in the face of heartbreak and loss. A true literary triumph, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao confirms Junot Díaz as one of the best and most exciting voices of our time.

What people are saying

Love it.

User Review  - Nivi L. - Overstock.com

My daughter picked this book from list of summer reading books for school. We are reading it together and enjoying it tremendously.The Sarcastic and down to earth storytelling is refreshing. We are ...

Best Price on a Wonderful Book

User Review  - harperfarm - Overstock.com

Needed this book for a class and Overstock had the best price. This is an intense great read. If you are sensitive about foul language this is not the book for you.

Contents

• Section 1: 1
• Section 2: 11
• Section 3: 51
• Section 4: 77
• Section 5: 167
• Section 6: 204
• Section 7: 205
• Section 8: 211
• Section 9: 263
• Section 10: 311
• Section 11: 315
• Section 12: 323
• Section 13: 329
• Section 14: 333
• Section 15: 337

About the author

Junot Díaz was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Drown; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award;  This Is How You Lose Her, a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist; and a debut picture book, Islandborn. He is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, PEN/Malamud Award, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and PEN/O. Henry Award. A graduate of Rutgers College, Díaz is currently the fiction editor at Boston Review and the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Pulitzer Prize Winner); 2018 Great American Read; Book club kit
• Author: Junot Díaz
• Edition: unabridged
• Publisher: Penguin, 2007
• ISBN: 1594489580, 9781594489587
• Length: 352 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Coming of Age; Fiction / Hispanic & Latino; Fiction / Literary