Junot Díaz
Junot Díaz was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and is the author of Drown, This Is How You Lose Her, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. His fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, African Voices, Glimmer Train Stories, Best American Short Stories, the Pushcart Prize and the O'Henry Prize Stories. He is fiction editor at the Boston Review and teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. JunotDíaz.com | ||
photo credit: Nina Subin |
Excerpted from an interview with Junot Díaz, by David Naimon |
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When you read a novel, you know the world of this novel will not end until the last page. It's a consolation for you to hold that book and watch the pages diminish. In real life the hourglass doesn't move like that. In real life your life can be snuffed or the person that you love the most, or the world that you inhabit can end without any warning. What a short story does is more realistically mirror what it means to live in the real, where sometimes we feel our lives are divided by chapters. Where we remember a person that we used to love, and in that moment they were everything and now they are completely gone from us. You remember a town where you went to college, and while you were living there in college it meant everything to you, and now you are far away and you haven't thought about it in forever. In a short story collection I feel like it mirrors the internal succession of worlds that many of us have within ourselves. And I think you can't do it the same way in a novel. I just think the short story has a lot more punch for what it means to live in a world where many of our choices are final and end way before we're ready for them to end.—Junot Díaz, interviewed by David Naimon |