Have you read Junot Diaz’s novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao? Everyone who mentions it is effusive with praise. No negative comments. I have it at home now and am eagerly anticipating a “good read.” His previous book, Drown is a collection of short stories published in 1996. With his writing often compared to that of Russo and Roth, his stories have frequently appeared in the New Yorker.
Recently, the National Book Critics Circle celebrated literature and literacy in America by announcing winners of the 2007 awards. Diaz won for fiction.
• The General Nonfiction award went to Harriet Washington for Medical Apartheid: the Dark History of Medical Experiments on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present.
• Edwidge Danticat won for Brother, I’m Dying in the Autobiography category. You may remember Haitian Danticat’s previous books Breath Eyes Memory & The Dewbreaker.
• The win for Biography went to Tim Jeal for Stanley: the Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer.
• Alex Ross won for Criticism with his book on modern music, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century.
• The Poetry award went to Mary Jo Bang for Elegy. Bang is an English Literature professor and this, her fifth book of poems, mourns the death of her adult son.