Rating: 
Summary: This is a great book!
Review: . . . but I hate Junot Diaz. I have been waiting like six years now for his novel to come out. When you read Drown, you will have to agree that he is one of the best of the young writers. You LIVE the Dominican epxerience through his words. The best story in the collection would have to be DROWN, which is a bit longer than the rest, but the humanity and honesty in that piece leaves you feeling as though you had just read an entire novel. We move from innocence to understanding to anger, regret, and longing all in one breathy, sexually risky passage in the middle of the piece that allows us to encapsule the whole work. The word "drown" takes on new meaning after that. I read both the English and Spanish versions, and the Spanish makes more sense because of the word play potential, but in the abstract the Engish is good, too. Come on, Junot Diaz, gives us a novel, man. You are the greatest!
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Summary: Modern, Authentic, and Edgy-- New Caribbean Voice
Review: Before I purchased the book I read an on-line interview of Diaz by Edwidge Danticat. In this interview Diaz said that he didn't like it too much when readers thought that the book was autobiographical in nature. In the sense that it meant he wasn't creative enough to write pure fiction. I have to admit that half way through the book I thought that it must be part autobiography because the stories were so personal and the emotions bare and exposed. My favorite is "Aurora". Readers who expected romanticized Latina writing might be disappointed, but that is really just too bad. Diaz' style is authentic, modern, and edgy. On a personal level, it gave me a glimpse of daily life on the other side of my island. I absolutely loved this book and I recommend it whole-heartedly.
Enjoy!
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Summary: I love this book, but now what?
Review: I loved this collection. It's from the heart. I read this eight years ago. Mr. Diaz hasn't written much since. A novel would be great. Junot if you read this, please don't live of this book any longer, write, write something new. Please.
Rating: 
Summary: Nice guy, poor collection
Review: In this collection of ten stories, the narrator is a young Dominican Republic boy who grows up with his father in America and is waiting for him to send for the rest of the family. The stories explore everything from his parents' marriage falling apart to interracial dating. However, I disliked the style of stories going back and forth in time, it was confusing, and sometimes it took it a while to tell if we were in America or the Dominican Republic still, or how old the narrator was, I liked how the author used Spanish words thrown in to the story; it helped it sound more realistic. However, his spare style bugged me. I got to meet the author, and he read us a story from another collection, which I liked a lot better.
Rating: 
Summary: Professional literary short fiction
Review: Junot Diaz is an especially talented craftsmen. In his collection of stories, "Drown," he has written a series of professional literary short stories that teem with detail about the Dominican experience and contain a plethora of ambiguous, life-like characters.Somehow, though, Diaz' stories are too professional. They're sure to please any committee made of MFA graduates and writing school instructors, and it's no surprise that Diaz had landed in "The New Yorker." As such, the style and plotting are too familiar to be called original or even noteworthy, if it weren't for the detail about the Dominican Republic. And right now, that's the only difference between Diaz and hundreds of Iowa graduates. I recently heard Diaz read in Berkeley from his novel in progress, and it sounds much better than the stories contained in "Drown." He's an intelligent writer with a fierce eye and ruthless character evaluation. And a distinct voice. "Drown" is a first book, rough in places, a bit cliché in composition, but written with a brilliant mind.
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Summary: An important voice in literature
Review: Junot Diaz writes fiction without flourish. His words are stark, edgy, direct - and his stories cut through stereotype right to the quick of the truth. DROWN pulses with the rhythms of Spanish and New Jersey accents as it explores lives in both The Dominican Republic and Jersey City. Mostly adolescents and young adults, the characters struggle against a dimming or obscured future, and tend to live for the moment, even as they hope for something better. The most compelling stories are "Ysrael," "Aurora," "Edison, New Jersey," and "How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie." This is a brief book, only ten stories and only a few over 20 pages long, but it packs power with its brevity.
I highly recommend this book for those with an interest in Latino and/or multicultural fiction, and for those who enjoy short story collections.
Rating:
Summary: An important voice in literature
Review: Junot Diaz writes fiction without flourish. His words are stark, edgy, direct - and his stories cut through stereotype right to the quick of the truth. DROWN pulses with the rhythms of Spanish and New Jersey accents as it explores lives in both The Dominican Republic and Jersey City. Mostly adolescents and young adults, the characters struggle against a dimming or obscured future, and tend to live for the moment, even as they hope for something better. The most compelling stories are "Ysrael," "Aurora," "Edison, New Jersey," and "How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie." This is a brief book, only ten stories and a few over 200 pages long, but it packs power with its brevity. I highly recommend this book for those with an interest in Latino and/or multicultural fiction, and for those who enjoy short story collections.
Rating: 
Summary: Afloat
Review: The string of short stories in Drown is pretty cool. It throws together the Dominican and new American experience from the POV of youth . This book is not just Dominican book, but a book of youth. It is hard to look back in that place called youth and Diaz does so with what appears to the reader, with ease. The stories range from Jersey project living to San Juan slum living. And the life from each facet explodes in a vibrance of pure phosphorescence. At times the stories are heartbreaking with their relentless truth, like in "Negocios". At other times stories are funny, like the government cheese bit in "How To Date A Browngirl...". But underlying everything is the sadness of the reality of poverty. We are dealing with real people in these stories. They are so real they come off the page and talk to you. Diaz has created characters so real that we actually empathize and eventually care for them. Therein lies Diaz's strongest gift in the field of writing. All of the stories are top notch, but the one that stands out the most is "Negocios". If the narrative voice of Raymond Carver were the guy sitting on the bar stool next to you, the voice of Junot Diaz is that of illegitamite latino brother you are meeting for the first time, you and your brother both having had a life of poverty. Both authors write smooth as an oral storyteller. Each in a friendly, enticing, inviting voice. Check this book out.
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Summary: Beautiful and stunning
Review: This book is a most honest and basic portrayal of humanity. Diaz's language is simple yet beautiful, and his themes are universal yet deeply challenging. The book follows the lives of different people, mostly Dominican, but it's characters relate to the reader's most basic human soul in the same way that Holden Caulfield does. A Brilliant Work
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Summary: The Immigrant Experience
Review: This exceedingly strong debut collection of stories is set in the ghettos of the Dominican Republic and New Jersey, but most of all in the invisible psychic landscape of the immigrants who move from the first to the latter. Six of the ten stories here may be familiar to readers of The New Yorker, Story, or other well-regarded literary mags in whose pages they previously appeared. Díaz's stories offer grimly matter-of-fact accounts of harsh childhoods in harsh environments where fathers are either feared or absent and mothers are exhausted and resigned to their fate. The stories set in the DR are from a youth's perspective, and have the unmistakable whiff of the autobiographical about them. In "Ysrael", the narrator and his brother are sent to the campo for the summer to live with relatives. There, they are casually cruel to a local boy whose face was disfigured by a pig. The boy later turns up as the subject of "No Face", which attempts to delve into his mind, with lesser effect than almost all the other stories. A third story, "Arguantando" follows the family from "Ysrael" as they wait to hear from their father, who has moved to the US. The final and longest story in the collection, "Negocios", explains the father's journey to the US and his many trials and tribulations before he can bring his family over. The stories set in the US follow the young boy as he grows older in New Jersey-where shoplifting, drug dealing, and eventually work replace the poverty of the slums of Santa Domingo. "Fiesta, 1980" is the best car-sickness story you're likely to read and "How To Date" is a quick guide to interracial dating, perhaps overly flip when compared to the other stories. In "Aurora", a teenage drug dealer (the young boy grown older?) daydreams about a normal life with a crack-addicted girl. The same character reappears in "Drown", describing a former close friend's homosexual advances and his own ambivalence. My favorite two stories were "Boyfriend" and "Edison, New Jersey". The first is a very brief story about a young man overhearing his downstairs neighbor's breakup, and working up the courage to eventually speak to her. The second is about a young man who helps deliver and assemble pool tables for a living and his well-meaning attempt to help a Dominican girl escape a life of sexual service. Both stories contain a wistful nostalgic air that's both dead on and haunting. All of Díaz's stories are immensely satisfying, and taken as a whole, they form an excellent picture of the Dominican immigrant experience. It's been six years now since this collection came out, and hopefully we'll be seeing something new soon from him.
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