Genre: Literary Fiction
Length: 339 pages
Audiobook Length: 16 hours
First Published: 2007
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Publisher’s Description
Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd who—from the New Jersey home he shares with his old world mother and rebellious sister—dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, finding love. But Oscar may never get what he wants. Blame the fukú—a curse that has haunted Oscar’s family for generations, following them on their epic journey from Santo Domingo to the USA. Encapsulating Dominican-American history, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao opens our eyes to an astonishing vision of the contemporary American experience and explores the endless human capacity to persevere—and risk it all—in the name of love.
Quotes from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
It’s never the changes we want that change everything.
But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.
Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can’t exist without one.
If you didn’t grow up like I did then you don’t know, and if you don’t know it’s probably better you don’t judge.
You can’t regret the life you didn’t lead.
About Junot Díaz
Junot Díaz is a Dominican-American author known for his books The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Drown, and This Is How You Lose Her. He is the fiction editor at Boston Review and a professor of writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Díaz currently lives in New Jersey. Visit the author’s website →
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