Junot Díaz won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for his debut novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. This epic is an atypical coming-of-age story about the literary-minded Oscar, along with meditations, both comic and tragic, on the members of his Dominican family. More broadly, however, it’s a biography of the relationship between then and now, there and here—between present-day New Jersey and the Dominican Republic under the dictatorship of Raphael Trujillo in the 1930s and 1940s. While it explores the complicated journeys made by the children of immigrants in America, the book also reminds us, with mesmerizing stories of generations past, that our homeland is never very far away. Díaz will speak in Memphis at the Germantown Performing Arts Center at 10:30 a.m. on April 8, and in Nashville at Stratford High School auditorium at 9 a.m. on April 9.
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