Junot Diaz

Last year Junot Diaz's novel, The brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao won numerous prizes, including America's top literary honours, the prize for the best novel ( critics) and so on. It won over another novel called The Savage Detectives.
I have started reading Oscar Wao and it promises to be quite good. A link to a longish extract from this novel here. There are numerous extracts and abstracts here, which give us a flavour of his earlier writings. His first collection of short stories is called Drown.

Diaz is a sci-fi lover and his fiction abounds in references to this genre. Alok mentioned Foster Wallace on his blog and there are supposed to be influences from the latter on Diaz's style. "Mario Vargas Llosa meets “Star Trek” meets David Foster Wallace meets Kanye West", NY times' Kakutani wrote about Diaz. A good collection of articles in NY Times.

I will write a post on Oscar Wao when I finish it, hopefully.