The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz audiobook

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

By Junot Díaz
Read by Jonathan Davis, with Staci Snell

Penguin Audio 9780143142805
15.98 Hours • Unabridged
Format : Digital Download (In Stock)
  • 1 Format: Digital Download

  • Regular Price: $22.50

    Special Price $18.00

    ISBN: 9780525493716

Read by Lin-Manuel Miranda, the Tony Award®-winning creator and star of the musical Hamilton, and Tony Award®-winning actress, Karen Olivo. This brilliant narration adds another layer of lyricism and depth to this Pulitzer Prize-winning classic novel. Things have never been easy for Oscar, a sweet but disastrously overweight, lovesick Dominican ghetto nerd. From his home in New Jersey, where he lives with his old-world mother and rebellious sister, Oscar dreams of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But he may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fuku: the curse that has haunted Oscar's family for generations, dooming them to prison, torture, tragic accidents, and, above all, ill-starred love. Oscar, still waiting for his first kiss, is just its most recent victim.   Diaz immerses us in the tumultuous life of Oscar and the history of the family at large, rendering with genuine warmth and dazzling energy, humor, and insight the Dominican-American experience - and, ultimately, the endless human capacity to persevere in the face of heartbreak and loss. A true literary triumph, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao confirms Junot Diaz as one of the best and most exciting voices of our time.

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Summary

Summary

Winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction

Winner of the 2008 Anisfield-Wolf Book Prize

A 2007 Los Angeles Times Book Prize Nominee for Fiction

New York Times Book Review 100 Notable Books for Fiction, 2007

A 2007 Time Magazine Top 10 Book for Fiction

A Publishers Weekly bestseller

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, September 2007

Winner of Anisfield-Wolf Book Award

Winner of Dayton Literary Peace Prize

Winner of IMPAC Dublin Literary Award

Winner of John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize

Winner of Massachusetts Book Award for Best Fiction

Among shortlisted titles for NAACP Image Award

Winner of National Book Critics Circle Awards

Winner of Pulitzer Prize (Fiction)

Read by Lin-Manuel Miranda, the Tony Award®-winning creator and star of the musical Hamilton, and Tony Award®-winning actress, Karen Olivo. This brilliant narration adds another layer of lyricism and depth to this Pulitzer Prize-winning classic novel.


Things have never been easy for Oscar, a sweet but disastrously overweight, lovesick Dominican ghetto nerd. From his home in New Jersey, where he lives with his old-world mother and rebellious sister, Oscar dreams of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But he may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fuku: the curse that has haunted Oscar's family for generations, dooming them to prison, torture, tragic accidents, and, above all, ill-starred love. Oscar, still waiting for his first kiss, is just its most recent victim.
 
Diaz immerses us in the tumultuous life of Oscar and the history of the family at large, rendering with genuine warmth and dazzling energy, humor, and insight the Dominican-American experience - and, ultimately, the endless human capacity to persevere in the face of heartbreak and loss. A true literary triumph, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao confirms Junot Diaz as one of the best and most exciting voices of our time.

Editorial Reviews

Editorial Reviews

“Díaz’s novel...has a wild, capacious spirit.” —New York Times Book Review
“Díaz made us wait eleven years for this first novel and boom—it’s over just like that...So brief and wondrous, this life of Oscar. Wow.” —Washington Post Book World
“Díaz finds a miraculous balance. He cuts his barnburning comic-book plots with honest, messy realism, and his narrator speaks in a dazzling hash of Spanish, English, slang, literary flourishes, and pure virginal dorkiness.” —New York Magazine
“Terrific...High-energy...It is a joy to read, and every bit as exhilarating to reread.” —Entertainment Weekly
“Díaz’s writing is unruly, manic, seductive…In Díaz’s landscape we are all the same, victims of a history and a present that doesn’t just bleed together but stew. Often in hilarity. Mostly in heartbreak.” —Esquire
“With The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Díaz has cemented his place in the literary stratosphere...Fans of literary fiction should dive right in.” —Bookmarks magazine
“This fierce, funny, tragic book is just what a reader would have hoped for in a novel by Junot Díaz.” —Publishers Weekly
“Exposing both the raw, carnal explorations of young protagonists and the environments that molded them, Davis and Snell work hard at portraying the intentions of each character...Well done and realistic.” —AudioFile
“Writing in a combustible mix of slang and lyricism, Díaz loops back and forth in time and place, generating sly and lascivious humor in counterpoint to tyranny and sorrow...Propelled by compassion, Díaz’s novel is intrepid and radiant.” —Booklist (starred review)
“A remarkable debut novel...Highly recommended.” —School Library Journal
“A rich, impassioned vision of the Dominican Republic and its diaspora, filtered through the destiny of a single family...A first novel that bursts alive in an ironic, confiding, exuberant voice.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Junot Díaz’s Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a wondrous, not-so-brief first novel that is so original it can only be described as Mario Vargas Llosa meets Star Trek meets David Foster Wallace meets Kanye West. It is funny, street-smart, and keenly observed...An extraordinarily vibrant book that’s fueled by adrenaline-powered prose...[Díaz has] written a book that decisively establishes him as one of contemporary fiction’s most distinctive and irresistible new voices.” —New York Times
“Weirdly wonderful...Díaz’s sentences [are] each rolled out with all the nerdy, wordy flair of an audacious imagination and a vocabulary to match.” —Washington Post
“Panoramic and yet achingly personal. It’s impossible to categorize, which is a good thing. Díaz’s novel is a hell of a book. It doesn’t care about categories.” —Los Angeles Times
“Genius...a story of the American experience that is giddily glorious and hauntingly horrific...The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao [is] something exceedingly rare.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Superb, deliciously casual and vibrant, shot through with wit and insight. The great achievement of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is Díaz’s ability to balance an intimate multigenerational story of familial tragedy…The past and present remain equally in focus, equally immediate, and Díaz’s acrobatic prose toggles artfully between realities, keeping us entralled with all.” —Boston Globe
“This was the most dynamic, entertaining, and achingly heartfelt novel I’ve read in a long time. My head is still buzzing with the memory of dozens of killer passages that I dog-eared throughout the book. The rope-a-dope narrative is funny, hip, tragic, soulful, and bursting with desire. Make some room for Oscar Wao on your bookshelf—you won’t be disappointed.”  —Amazon.com editorial review
“In a story that moves back and forth between the Dominican Republic and Paterson, New Jersey, Díaz illuminates the tragic arc of Dominican history (especially under the brutal Trujillo regime) in the lives of Oscar’s sister, mother, grandmother, and aunt. Shot through with witty cultural footnotes, scabrous slang, and touches of magic realism, this heartbreaking family saga is a work of brave originality.” —Barnes & Noble editorial review
“Astoundingly great.” —Time
An extraordinarily vibrant book that's fueled by adrenaline-powered prose. . . A book that decisively establishes [Díaz] as one of contemporary fiction's most distinctive and irresistible new voices. — Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
Díaz finds a miraculous balance. He cuts his barn-burning comic-book plots (escape, ruin, redemption) with honest, messy realism, and his narrator speaks in a dazzling hash of Spanish, English, slang, literary flourishes, and pure virginal dorkiness. —New York Magazine
"Genius. . . a story of the American experience that is giddily glorious and hauntingly horrific. And what a voice Yunior has. His narration is a triumph of style and wit, moving along Oscar de Leon's story with cracking, down-low humor, and at times expertly stunning us with heart-stabbing sentences. That Díaz's novel is also full of ideas, that [the narrator's] brilliant talking rivals the monologues of Roth's Zuckerman—in short, that what he has produced is a kick-ass (and truly, that is just the word for it) work of modern fiction—all make The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao something exceedingly rare: a book in which a new America can recognize itself, but so can everyone else. —San Francisco Chronicle
Astoundingly great. . . Díaz has written. . . a mixture of straight-up English, Dominican Spanish, and hieratic nerdspeak crowded with references to Tolkien, DC Comics, role-playing games, and classic science fiction. . . In lesser hands Oscar Wao would merely have been the saddest book of the year. With Díaz on the mike, it's also the funniest. —Time 
"Superb, deliciously casual and vibrant, shot through with wit and insight. The great achievement of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is Díaz's ability to balance an intimate multigenerational story of familial tragedy. . . The past and present remain equally in focus, equally immediate, and Díaz's acrobatic prose toggles artfully between realities, keeping us enthralled with all. —The Boston Globe
"Panoramic and yet achingly personal. It's impossible to categorize, which is a good thing. There's the epic novel, the domestic novel, the social novel, the historical novel, and the 'language' novel. People talk about the Great American Novel and the immigrant novel. Pretty reductive. Díaz's novel is a hell of a book. It doesn't care about categories. It's densely populated; it's obsessed with language. It's Dominican and American, not about immigration but diaspora, in which one family's dramas are entwined with a nation's, not about history as information but as dark-force destroyer. Really, it's a love novel. . . His dazzling wordplay is impressive. But by the end, it is his tenderness and loyalty and melancholy that breaks the heart. That is wondrous in itself. —Los Angeles Times
Díaz's writing is unruly, manic, seductive. . . In Díaz's landscape we are all the same, victims of a history and a present that doesn't just bleed together but stew. Often in hilarity. Mostly in heartbreak. —Esquire
The Dominican Republic [Díaz] portrays in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a wild, beautiful, dangerous, and contradictory place, both hopelessly impoverished and impossibly rich. Not so different, perhaps, from anyone else's ancestral homeland, but Díaz's weirdly wonderful novel illustrates the island's uniquely powerful hold on Dominicans wherever they may wander. Díaz made us wait eleven years for this first novel and boom!—it's over just like that. It's not a bad gambit, to always leave your audience wanting more. So brief and wondrous, this life of Oscar. Wow. —The Washington Post Book World
Terrific. . . High-energy. . . It is a joy to read, and every bit as exhilarating to reread. —Entertainment Weekly
"Now that Díaz's second book, a novel called The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, has finally arrived, younger writers will find that the bar. And some older writers—we know who we are—might want to think about stepping up their game. Oscar Wao shows a novelist engaged with the culture, high and low, and its polyglot language. If Donald Barthelme had lived to read Díaz, he surely would have been delighted to discover an intellectual and linguistic omnivore who could have taught even him a move or two. —Newsweek
Few books require a 'highly flammable' warning, but The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz's long-awaited first novel, will burn its way into your heart and sizzle your senses. Díaz's novel is drenched in the heated rhythms of the real world as much as it is laced with magical realism and classic fantasy stories. —USA Today
"Dark and exuberant. . . this fierce, funny, tragic book is just what a reader would have hoped for in a novel by Junot Díaz. —Publishers Weekly

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Author

Author Bio: Junot Díaz

Author Bio: Junot Díaz

Junot Díaz is the author of several critically acclaimed books, including The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and This Is How You Lose Her, a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist. He is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, PEN/Malamud Award, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and O. Henry Award. A graduate of Rutgers College, he is fiction editor at Boston Review and the Rudge and is the Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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Details

Details

Available Formats : Digital Download
Runtime: 15.98
Audience: Adult
Language: English

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