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1 month ago | 
junot.substack.com | Junot Diaz |Junot Díaz
To sing this story from our wine-dark world into the warring stars I must first tell you about the boy. A Machine boy named Gilgamek. Who lived, of all places, on the planet Urth. Urth! A name that once struck terror in the hearts of a thousand worlds … but no more. Urth had fallen mightily since the days of its imperial majesty, no longer the conqueror of galaxies, no longer the source or center of anything — hard to imagine it ever was.
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2 months ago | 
elespanol.com | Junot Diaz |Junot Díaz
Cyrus Shams, el afligido protagonista de la incandescente primera novela de Kaveh Akbar (Teherán, 1989), es una auténtica multitud rushdiana: un estadounidense nacido en Irán, un inmigrante “malo”, un adicto en recuperación, un homosexual que parece heterosexual, un poeta de casi treinta años que rara vez escribe, un huérfano, un letraherido infatigable, un ingenio apasionado, un descontento autocompasivo. Pero, sobre todo, Cyrus está triste.
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2 months ago | 
kornferry.com | Kurt Vonnegut |Junot Diaz |Junot Díaz |Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |Harper Lee
The question used to be whether to read the book or watch the movie. These days, of course, there is a third option, which is to listen to the audio version of a book narrated by the familiar voice of a favorite actor. A-list celebrities are venturing into the burgeoning audiobook scene, bringing life to children's books, adding new textures to old classics, and even making personal memoirs more intimate by reciting them firsthand.
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Mar 14, 2025 | 
terryfreedman.substack.com | Terry Freedman |Junot Diaz |Junot Díaz
This is a new mini-series I started recently, for paid subscribers only. But this post is free to everyone! I’ve changed the remit slightly. Originally I wrote:The fiction I love the most comes in the form of short stories. You can learn so much about different cultures just through the stories and tales they tell. In this new series I’m going to share some of the collections I’ve enjoyed the most, and why.
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Jan 15, 2025 | 
ireland-live.ie | Junot Diaz |Junot Díaz |Michelle O'Keeffe
An Táin Arts Centre’s monthly Book Club returns this month and members are reading The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz. The Book Club has been going strong since April 2020 and now meets in Roe River Books on Clanbrassil Street in Dundalk. The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao tells the story of a ghetto nerd Oscar, who is sweet but disastrously overweight, and living with his Dominican family in New Jersey. He dreams of becoming the next J. R. R.
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Nov 18, 2024 | 
nytimes.com | Junot Diaz |Junot Díaz
THE CITY AND ITS UNCERTAIN WALLS, by Haruki Murakami. Translated by Philip Gabriel. When we first meet the nameless narrator of Haruki Murakami's eerie new novel, "The City and Its Uncertain Walls," he is a high school loner whose only friend is his cat. A chance meeting at a school awards ceremony brings him into the orbit of an equally isolated eccentric 16-year-old who can't always distinguish her dreams from real life.
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Nov 5, 2024 | 
junot.substack.com | Junot Diaz |Junot Díaz
I have friends who survived the campaign cycle by following every nauseating twist —saturation therapy — and other friends who tuned out completely. I tried to preserve my sanity by following at a distance and by reading a lot, especially Octavia Butler (as most of you will have already noticed). Butler is that rarest of artists: a prophet of dark times who is also an immense source of inspiration and wisdom for dark times. And if we can agree on anything, these are very dark times indeed.
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Sep 29, 2024 | 
fivebooks.com | Margaret Atwood |Graham Greene |Hilary Mantel |Junot Diaz |Junot Díaz
Below, some of the books that have been recommended by experts on Five Books that have been performed as audiobooks by well-known actors:The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret AtwoodNarrated by Elisabeth MossListening time: 11 hours and 22 minutesThere are a number of audiobook versions of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel. This one is narrated by the cast of the TV series, led by Elisabeth Moss, who won an Emmy for her role.
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Aug 22, 2024 | 
newyorker.com | Junot Diaz |Junot Díaz
This is the seventh story in this summer’s online Flash Fiction series. Read the entire series, and our Flash Fiction from previous years, here. “Beloved” was the first time we read together. Sophomore year, when you were still with your moreno boyfriend and I lived in that cold apartment on Easton. That was the year you went the full Assata—from your hair to your books, your clothes, your classes.
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Jul 15, 2024 | 
junot.substack.com | Junot Diaz |Junot Díaz
There are some who claim that Stephen King’s The Dead Zone predicted the rise of Trump, a novel about precognition becoming its own act of prescience. Stephen King himself has not shied away from the comparisons. “I was sort of convinced that it was possible that a politician would arise who was so outside the mainstream and so willing to say anything that he would capture the imaginations of the American people.
