An excerpt from Junot Diaz’s new short story collection, This Is How You Lose Her:
See, many months ago, when Magda was still my girl, when I didn’t have to be careful about almost anything, I cheated on her with this chick who had tons of eighties free-style hair. Didn’t tell Magda about it, either. You know how it is. A smelly bone like that, better off buried in the backyard of your life. Magda only found out about it because homegirl wrote her a fucking letter. And the letter had details. Shit you wouldn’t even tell your boys drunk.
Michael Bourne is impressed with how Diaz's casual jokes manage to "dance so precariously along the color line":
Take that opening paragraph from the collection’s first story, "The Sun, the Moon, the Stars": "You know how it is," Yunior says of his decision not to tell his girlfriend about his cheating. "A smelly bone like that, better off buried in the backyard of your life." Already, just a few lines into the story, you – whoever you are, white, black, brown, American, Dominican, German, Aussie – are complicit in Yunior’s crime. You know how it is. Even better is the line about the incriminating details in the girlfriend’s letter: "Shit you wouldn’t even tell your boys drunk." It happens so quickly and so effortlessly that you don’t realize that in eight words Diaz has supplied you not only with a scarlet letter’s worth of sexual indiscretions, but a girlfriend, a girl on the side, and a group of "boys" to listen while you brag about it. You, my friend, are a player, a Latin chick-magnet, a sucio, and all you did was open a book and start reading.
This is one of Diaz’s greatest gifts, the intimacy of his voice, the way he invites you over to his place to smoke a few bowls and talk about girls, the way, in story after story, he lets you in on the fun.
Devan Schwartz elaborates on Diaz's voice:
These stories are marked by being polylingual. It’s not just English, though language is wielded like a battleaxe and a scalpel in the same sentence. It’s not just Spanish, which normalizes and defamiliarizes in unaccented usage ("Sounds like you’re going to be bien cómoda, Marisol says.") These stories speak nerd and academic, hypermasculinity, New Jersey Dominican. They tap into many different vectors and valences while also giving a feeling of unity and consistency, painted with the same colors or at least the same brushes. And since no fluency is marked by clutter, these stories feel incredibly uncluttered.
After bar hopping with Junot, Amos Barshad realizes another key to the author's success:
His characters obsess over their ladies — they pine and swoon; they detail their bodies in electrically vivid detail. Slate just named Díaz "our finest describer of hot chicas — America's poet laureate of pulchritude." Plus, there's my friend Nitasha, who for a minute now has been talking about pitching a startup idea: HaveJunotDiazPersonallyDescribeMyBody.com.
I share Nitasha's brilliant plan with Díaz, and it's the only time all night he seems genuinely honored. He explains why: "Any guy gets the full dose of misogyny of your culture. A blind spot in the imagination vis-à-vis women. And I really believe this in my heart: What made it possible for me to be a writer was wrestling with that blind spot. My ability to see women with any clarity is the linchpin of my art."
The Dish 