{"id":20640,"date":"2013-08-19T08:00:35","date_gmt":"2013-08-19T13:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs2.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/?p=20640"},"modified":"2013-08-14T19:08:12","modified_gmt":"2013-08-15T00:08:12","slug":"this-is-how-you-lose-her-by-junot-diaz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/this-is-how-you-lose-her-by-junot-diaz\/","title":{"rendered":"This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"This<\/a>Pulitzer Prize winning author, Junot D\u00edaz writes with a kind of swagger and cool that makes it pretty hard to believe that he’s a creative writing professor at MIT. \u00a0Having recently finished reading his third published book, a collection of short stories called\u00a0<\/span>This is How You Lose Her<\/a>,<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0<\/strong>I am convinced that he knows every dirty word in English and Spanish. \u00a0Particularly if the words are referencing female anatomy. \u00a0So be warned, this is not the novel for anyone offended by salty and sexual language.<\/p>\n

But if you can get beyond that, I can’t recommend this book enough. D\u00edaz, himself a Dominican immigrant, tells stories about immigrants that<\/span>\u00a0help create a full picture of why someone is who they are. He shows that machismo is often a projection due to a lack of respect, and poor behavior isn’t something to be excused, but it can sometimes be explained. This is never more true than in his semi-autobiographical character, Yunior, the protagonist of most of this collection.<\/span><\/p>\n

Readers may have met Yunior in D\u00edaz’s\u00a0The Brief Life of Oscar Wao <\/strong><\/em><\/a>(winner of the aforementioned Pulitzer)\u00a0or in his first published collection of short stories, Drown<\/strong><\/em><\/a>, but I met Yunior for the first time after he cheated on Magda in This is How You Lose Her<\/strong><\/em>. \u00a0As he cheats his way through many of these short stories — and continues to imprison himself in grief and regret following the discovery of his transgressions — Yunior’s story becomes less about each individual relationship and more about how Yunior’s relationships reflect his own self-image and cultural identity. \u00a0The most powerful passages in the novel occur in his home, when we meet his family and see the effects of his father and brother’s infidelity on the family. Equally funny and frustrating, D\u00edaz has written a complicated novel that feels both universal and unique.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pulitzer Prize winning author, Junot D\u00edaz writes with a kind of swagger and cool that makes it pretty hard to believe that he’s a creative writing professor at MIT. \u00a0Having recently finished reading his third published book, a collection of short stories called\u00a0This is How You Lose Her,\u00a0I am convinced[Read more]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10,1,8],"tags":[2374,2369,2370,2373,2371,2372,248,680,605],"class_list":["post-20640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-reference","category-staff-picks","tag-cheating","tag-dominican","tag-dominican-republic","tag-english","tag-fidelity","tag-infidelity","tag-love","tag-relationships","tag-spanish"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pd0CXx-5mU","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20640"}],"version-history":[{"count":24,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20640\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20732,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20640\/revisions\/20732"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}