This is How You Lose Her

Before I begin, let me tell you Arlee Bird has been kind enough to host me on Tossing it Out today. Please stop by and leave a word if you like.
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As I’ve said before, I’m reading more novels than short stories now. Perhaps because I’ done with my first draft and am taking apart other novels to see how they were put together.

But every once in a while I pick up a collection of stories, and nowadays, you can’t really ignore Junot Diaz. The library had all copies of This is How You Lose Her reserved for a while, but now that I’ve got my copy, I’m taking time off only for meals and other activities essential to life. And blogging as I have my dinner, of course.

Excerpt from ‘This is How You Lose Her’ by Junot Diaz

The hype isn’t overrated. The voice is gorgeous, in-your-face, unapologetic, not worried about local slang in another language or swearing; and hypnotized like a mouse before a swaying cobra, neither is the reader. And the stories are poignant, funny, brash, ugly and beautiful at the same time.

I’m off to dive in again. See you on the other side. And oh, before I sign off, here’s the blurb:

On a beach in the
Dominican Republic, a doomed relationship flounders. In the heat of a
hospital laundry room in New Jersey, a woman does her lover’s washing
and thinks about his wife. In Boston, a man buys his love child, his
only son, a first baseball bat and glove. At the heart of these stories
is the irrepressible, irresistible Yunior, a young hardhead whose
longing for love is equaled only by his recklessness–and by the
extraordinary women he loves and loses: artistic Alma; the aging Miss
Lora; Magdalena, who thinks all Dominican men are cheaters; and the love
of his life, whose heartbreak ultimately becomes his own. In prose that
is endlessly energetic, inventive, tender, and funny, the stories in
This Is How You Lose Her lay bare the infinite longing and inevitable
weakness of the human heart. They remind us that passion always triumphs
over experience, and that “the half-life of love is forever.”