Ratings51
Average rating3.7
Finalist for the 2012 National Book Award A Time and People Top 10 Book of 2012 Finalist for the 2012 Story Prize Chosen as a notable or best book of the year by The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, The LA Times, Newsday, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, the iTunes bookstore, and many more... "Electrifying." –The New York Times Book Review “Exhibits the potent blend of literary eloquence and street cred that earned him a Pulitzer Prize… Díaz’s prose is vulgar, brave, and poetic.” –O Magazine From the award-winning author, a stunning collection that celebrates the haunting, impossible power of love. On a beach in the Dominican Republic, a doomed relationship flounders. In a New Jersey laundry room, 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. In prose that is endlessly energetic, inventive, tender, and funny, these stories 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.”
Reviews with the most likes.
The whole book felt completely fresh and surprising, and even a day after finishing I'm still feeling hopped up on it. It's an unabashedly hetero-masculine point of view, in a way that specifically excludes women from identifying with it. This sounds negative but that's not at all how I (as a woman) experienced the book; rather, it was eye-opening and exhilarating and, well, fresh and surprising.
There were a lot of slang words, which I had to look up. There were a lot of Spanish words, which I had to look up. There were a lot of $50 Harvard words, which I had to look up. This mix of street/Latino/highbrow made the book vivid and vibrant.
Highly recommend.
I started this book about a decade ago in a Half Price Books and thought it was time to finally finish it. Though it was very nostalgic read for that reason, it was also a strange read because I cannot imagine such a sexist book being as popular of a release today. I know bad characters don't always equate to a bad worldview, but plain awareness isn't enough to justify being a shitty person, especially when you attribute awfulness to heredities and the book itself seems so autofictitious. Beyond, but not excluding or excusing, all that, the book just made me feel bad and I didn't very much enjoy reading it.
Stole this from my mom, and read it in 24 hours heading back across the country. I'm not sure why I love Yunior's voice so much, but I do. I first read a bunch of these in The New Yorker, but they were a pleasure to re-read. “The half-life of love is forever”...