The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao

Things have never been easy for Oscar. A ghetto nerd living with his Dominican family in New Jersey, he's sweet but disastrously overweight. He dreams of becoming the next J.R.R. Tolkien but keeps falling hopelessly in love. Meanwhile, his punk sister Lola wants to run away, and his enduring mother Beli can't seem to let either of them go.  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.

This warm, completely original and hugely acclaimed first novel tells the wondrous story of Oscar and his family, and their attempts to find love and belonging in America.

"The Dominican Republic he portrays in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a wild, beautiful, dangerous and contradictory place, both hopelessly impoverished and impossibly rich...a borderless anxiety zone that James Baldwin would describe as ‘the anguished diaspora’ … In no rush to spill the details of his hero's short, star-crossed adventures, Díaz maneuvers his plot through various time shifts, settings and narrators. From Santo Domingo to Washington Heights, N.Y., to Paterson, N.J., various generations of de Leons wrestle with fate and lose … I find sufficient meaning in the sheer joy of absorbing Díaz's sentences, each rolled out with all the nerdy, wordy flair of an audacious imagination and a vocabulary to match."  -  Jabari Asim, The Washington Post