Maxima Library

"This stunning collection of stories offers an unsentimental glimpse of life among the immigrants from the Dominican Republic-and other front-line reports on the ambivalent promise of the American dream-by an eloquent and original writer who describes more than physical dislocation in conveying the price that is paid for leaving culture and homeland behind." — San Francisco Chronicle.Junot Diaz's stories are as vibrant, tough, unexotic, and beautiful as their settings — Santa Domingo, Dominican Neuva York, the immigrant neighborhoods of industrial New Jersey with their gorgeously polluted skyscapes. Places and voices new to our literature yet classically American: coming-of-age stories full of wild humor, intelligence, rage, and piercing tenderness. And this is just the beginning. Diaz is going to be a giant of American prose. -Francisco Goldman

Ever since Diaz began publishing short stories in venues as prestigious as The New Yorker, he has been touted as a major new talent, and his debut collection affirms this claim. Born and raised in Santo Domingo, Diaz uses the contrast between his island homeland and life in New York City and New Jersey as a fulcrum for his trenchant tales. His young male narrators are teetering into precarious adolescence. For these sons of harsh or absent fathers and bone-weary, stoic mothers, life is an unrelenting hustle. In Santo Domingo, they are sent to stay with relatives when the food runs out at home; in the States, shoplifting and drugdealing supply material necessities and a bit of a thrill in an otherwise exhausting and frustrating existence. There is little affection, sex is destructive, conversation strained, and even the brilliant beauty of a sunset is tainted, its colors the product of pollutants. Keep your eye on Diaz; his first novel is on the way. -Booklist

2008-ųjų Pulitzerio premijos laureatas Junot Diaz yra vienas išskirtiniausių ir įdomiausių balsų šiuolaikinėje amerikiečių literatūroje. Jo proza – vulgari, drąsi ir poetiška, jo kalba – literatūrinės elegancijos ir gatvės žargono mišinys.„Štai taip tu ją prarandi“ – devynios tikrumu nuginkluojančios istorijos apie netobulą meilę. Jų centre – jaunas kietakaktis Junioras, kurio širdį autorius negailestingai sudaužo daugybę kartų, demonstruodamas, kaip stipriai meilė, romantiška, fizinė ar šeimos, gali paveikti net ir vyriškiausią charakterį. Junot Diaz sielvartą prilygina radiacijai – gali palaidoti ir bandyti pamiršti, tačiau ji niekada galutinai neišnyks.

“As our vision becomes more global, our storytelling is stretching in many ways. Stories increasingly change point of view, switch location, and sometimes pack as much material as a short novel might,” writes guest editor Elizabeth Strout. “It’s the variety of voices that most indicates the increasing confluence of cultures involved in making us who we are.” The Best American Short Stories 2013 presents an impressive diversity of writers who dexterously lead us into their corners of the world.

In “Miss Lora,” Junot Díaz masterfully puts us in the mind of a teenage boy who throws aside his better sense and pursues an intimate affair with a high school teacher. Sheila Kohler tackles innocence and abuse as a child wanders away from her mother, in thrall to a stranger she believes is the “Magic Man.” Kirstin Valdez Quade’s “Nemecia” depicts the after-effects of a secret, violent family trauma. Joan Wickersham’s “The Tunnel” is a tragic love story about a mother’s declining health and her daughter’s helplessness as she struggles to balance her responsibility to her mother and her own desires. New author Callan Wink’s “Breatharians” unsettles the reader as a farm boy shoulders a grim chore in the wake of his parents’ estrangement.

“Elizabeth Strout was a wonderful reader, an author who knows well that the sound of one’s writing is just as important as and indivisible from the content,” writes series editor Heidi Pitlor. “Here are twenty compellingly told, powerfully felt stories about urgent matters with profound consequences.”

This is the long-awaited first novel from one of the most original and memorable writers working today.

Things have never been easy for Oscar, 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 the 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.

On a beach in the Dominican Republic, a doomed relationship flounders. In the heat of a hospital laundry room in New Jersey, a woman does her lover’s washing and thinks about his wife. In Boston, a man buys his love child, his only son, a first baseball bat and glove. At the heart of these stories is the irrepressible, irresistible Yunior, a young hardhead whose longing for love is equaled only by his recklessness-and by the extraordinary women he loves and loses: artistic Alma; the aging Miss Lora; Magdalena, who thinks all Dominican men are cheaters; and the love of his life, whose heartbreak ultimately becomes his own. In prose that is endlessly energetic, inventive, tender, and funny, the stories in This Is How You Lose Her lay bare the infinite longing and inevitable weakness of the human heart. They remind us that passion always triumphs over experience, and that “the half-life of love is forever.”

IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT…

For decades, the apocalypse and its aftermath have yielded some of the most exciting short stories of all time. From David Brin’s seminal “The Postman” to Hugh Howey’s “Deep Blood Kettle” and Tananarive Due’s prescient “Patient Zero,” the end of the world continues to thrill.

This companion volume to the critically acclaimed WASTELANDS offers thirty of the finest examples of post-apocalyptic short fiction, with works by:

Ann Aguirre

Megan Arkenberg

Paolo Bacigalupi

Christopher Barzak

Lauren Beukes

David Brin

Orson Scott Card

Junot Díaz

Cory Doctorow

Tananarive Due

Toiya Kristen Finley

Milo James Fowler

Maria Dahvana Headley

Hugh Howey

Keffy R. M. Kehrli

Jake Kerr

Nancy Kress

Joe R. Lansdale

George R. R. Martin

Jack McDevitt

Seanan McGuire

Maureen F. McHugh

D. Thomas Minton

Rudy Rucker & Bruce Sterling

Ramsey Shehadeh

Robert Silverberg

Rachel Swirsky

Genevieve Valentine

James Van Pelt

Christie Yant

Award-winning editor John Joseph Adams has once again assembled a who’s who of short fiction, and the result is nothing short of mind-blowing.