MIT Author Junot Diaz Is On the Road

"On fire again..." That's how the Los Angeles Times describes MIT professor and Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Diaz's new book, This Is How You Lose Her. National Public Radio and Slate are drooling over the new work of short fiction. The New York Times credits Diaz with "one of the most distinctive and magnetic voices in contemporary fiction."

If you want to hear that voice for yourself, you can stop by one of the dozens of readings scheduled across the country through April. There are several readings in Cambridge and Boston—including one tonight on campus.

Díaz won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a tale set in New Jersey and the Dominican Republic that depicts the tangles of a sci-fi loving son of immigrants, his family and lost loves, and the violence of the Trujillo-era Caribbean. For some history (and humor), watch a 2008 episode of a Colbert Report interview.

The new book is a set of short stories that features Yunior, a character from Diaz's earlier work of short fiction who lives dislocated between cultures and obsessed with women, but unable to maintain relationships.

To learn more, read a recent New York Times interview of  the book by Díaz, the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at MIT.