This Is How You Lose Her is another blast of ingenious storytelling from the talented Junot Diaz. In 1997 he walloped the literary landscape and established his name as a meteoric presence with Drown, a collection of gritty stories centering on Dominican American immigrants and culture. Not until a decade later did he finish his next work, the acclaimed novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which recounts in ecstatic prose the tragedies that befall a first generation Dominican American fam...

I hate to filter my response to book based upon others' responses to a book, but after a National Book Award nomination, a Guggenheim, and the almost unseemly vocal adoration of seemingly every major reviewer, one comes to a book with certain expectations. And in the case of this collection of nine short stories (seven of which were published previously in periodicals) that it took the author ten-plus years to complete, the subjects of which are men who keep cheating on their girlfriends and fee...

"This Is How you Lose Her" (SP): The newest one by darling Junot Diaz is so theme-heavy, so break-up-centric, that you soon realize that the writer is a wee less dynamic than we'd originally thought. From acclaimed short stories to the dynamite novel that bestowed upon him the nifty Pulitzer--what could the young writer come up with next? Easy... a valentine for heartbreak. Most of the characters in "Lose Her" are flawlessly interchangeable, all women have long sexy dark hair, all men are extrao...

This is a collection of short stories about Yunior. Yunior is a louse. All the men in his life are serial cheaters from his father to his brother to his best friend. Yes, there is a pitch that this is part of the Dominican Culture -- but frankly I can speak with women friends of mine from France, Spain, Italy, Russia, Germany and England and every single one of them knows this guy or has dated this clown. He screws around on women, and when he is caught and discarded there is great chest thumpin...

This is how you lost me. You gave me flat characters powered by preoccupations with sex and body parts, especially bushy hair, peppered the prose with Spanish words that were often slangy or derogatory, and allowed superficial, albeit energetic, descriptions of shallow thoughtlessness to masquerade as gritty literary style.I am puzzled as to why I feel so far off the general opinion of the literary pundits who widely praise this book. I do wonder if it is because of my utter lack of exposure to

Junot Diaz brings back Yunior from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao as the narrator for most of the stories but leaves out the Dominican history and the geek references. Instead we get to read about heartbreak, infidelity, remorse, alienation and cancer. You know, the stuff that makes life worth living.Taken as a whole, these powerful stories give us a history for Yunior as he grows up in Jersey as a Dominican immigrant dealing with his family and his tendency to cheat on the women in his li...

I had the honour of attending Junot Diaz's author talk late last month here in Vancouver. He was reading excerpts from the first three of the short stories in this book (The Sun, The Moon, The Stars; Nilda and Alma). I was honestly struck by how emphatically he read his own stories, even more impressed that I remembered his cadences. He is a gifted orator, as well as a storyteller.As mentioned, this is a collection of short stories. They all feature a young Dominican-American man named Yunior, t...

Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5How does an author follow up a Pulitzer Prize winning novel? For one thing, you’d hope that under no circumstances they would attempt to replicate the work. Junot Diaz has come full circle and returned to his writing roots. Like his debut collection of short stories Drown, Diaz’s third literary outing, This Is How You Lose Her, is also comprised of short stories, but these revolve around the love life of Yunior, the character who surfaced in Drown and the author’s break...

Voice, voice, voice. What a treasure. This slim volume of nine short stories, about the battlefield of love. There's cheating. And searching. Being with one you don't want. Yearning for the one you want. Watching parents struggle with their own disappointments. Several of the stories feature Yunior, a young Dominican man--sometimes boy--struggling to live up to male culture while at the same time trying to find what's true to himself--while his brother Rafa is a pure heat-seeking missile of sex....

Nine interlinked short tales chronicling ruined relationships, cheating, death, family, and more. 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.“And that’s when I know it’s over. As soo...

The straight reviewers (meaning non-GR) have curled up and just about died of pure pleasure from reading this book, but I was not quite so jaw on the floor, for me it was a little bit Junot Diaz’s difficult third album. 1996, 2007, 2012 – three books, not big ones either, in 15 years. If Junot Diaz was a singer songwriter he’d be Kate Bush. He takes forever on his stuff. It reads extremely fast, goes down like alcopop, but you know it’s meticulous. He keens over every word, and the words are goo...

1.) Misogyny. Women are just fucktoys. Men are not loyal, never will be loyal, and women shouldn't expect them to be. Men will cheat and fuck anything that moves until they die. Just the way it is. There's no such thing as a loyal husband or boyfriend.Women have no personalities or character traits. Instead they are distinguished by their body parts, "the one with the small breasts," "the one with the wide hips," "the one with the gigantic ass."2.) The world is pain. Everything is terrible. Ther...

Released September 11, I heard a a lot of hype for this book by Junot Diaz. I wanted to see--what is all the fuss about? Why did this jump to the top of the NY Bestseller List? I think I can tell you. In my best bookish librarian voice: the writing is raw. Eye-opening. It shifts between several different love stories, some unrequited, some failed...some still standing. I felt as if the narrator was sitting with me on the stoop of some NY slum, telling me about this girlfriend. Or this story that...

a.k.a The Various Sexcapades of Yunior and Other Dominican Men.I can praise this. I can even say that it shows you a more accurate representation of what love is than a hell lot of books out there. But I won't. Yunior, so funny and eloquent in Oscar Wao, is only amusing at best here. From start to end, it's just an unemotional, cold, and distant narration of who he fucked and who he cheated on and what he did to win them back - only to lapse back into the habit like gamblers and alcoholics.There...

Junot Diaz has always been a favorite author of mine, ever since college when he came to the Latin-American lit class I was taking in '98. By that time, I had already read Drown and was on my way to reading Negocios, the Spanish translation of Drown, expertly done by my lit. professor, Mr. Eduardo Lago (even the colloquialisms and the SHUCO-ness, the grit, the sarcasm, the naughtiness, came through, which I know, as an amateur translator myself, is supremely tough to accomplish).Diaz's language,...

I have to preface this review with the following: I saw Junot Díaz at a sold-out Inprint event in Houston earlier this fall where he was promoting This is How You Lose Her. Anyone who has met Díaz in person will understand the significance of this statement. Díaz is a bona-fide firecracker and has a great sense of humor to boot. He showed up on stage in tennis shoes and blue jeans and held the audience completely captive. He was exceedingly liberal with his language, which, by the way, works its...