Drown (short story collection)

Drown is the debut short story collection from Dominican-American author Junot Díaz and was published by Riverhead Books in 1996.

Drown precedes his novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the short story collection This Is How You Lose Her. Drown is dedicated to his mother, Virtudes Díaz.

Drown

First edition cover image
Author	Junot Díaz
Country	United States of America
Language	English
Genre	Fiction, Short story collection
Publisher	Riverhead Books
Publication date	1996
Media type	Print (Hardcover)
Pages	208
ISBN	1-57322-606-8

Background

Díaz attended Kean College in Union, New Jersey for one year before transferring and ultimately completing his B.A. at Rutgers University in 1992. Yunior would become central to much of Díaz's work and Díaz would later explain: "My idea, ever since Drown, was to write six or seven books about him that would form one big novel." ^[1] He earned his MFA from Cornell University in 1995, where he wrote most of his first collection of short stories.

As David Gates wrote in his The New York Times review of Drown: "In five of these ten stories, his narrator is young Ramon de las Casas, called Yunior, whose father abandons his wife and children for years before returning to the Dominican Republic and bringing them back with him to New Jersey. In other stories, the nameless tellers may or may not be Yunior, but they're all young Latino men with the same well-defended sensitivity, uneasy relations with women and obsessive watchfulness."^[2]

Stories

• "Ysrael" first appeared in Story magazine and was included in The Best American Short Stories, 1996. - "Ysrael" tells the story of Yunior and his brother Rafa in the Dominican Republic searching for a neighborhood boy whose face was disfigured by a pig, causing him to wear a mask at all times.
• "Fiesta, 1980" first appeared in Story magazine and was included in The Best American Short Stories, 1997 - Explains the events surrounding a family party in the Bronx, Yunior's difficult relationship with his strict father, and his struggles with carsickness.
• "Aurora" - This story discusses Lucerio's life as a drug dealer and his romantic relationship with a heroin addict. Here, he dreams of having a normal life with Aurora, but her addiction presents major obstacles.
• "Aguantando" - Follows Yunior's anticipation to hear from his father, who has left for the United States
• "Drown" first appeared in the 29 January 1996 issue of The New Yorker - Describes Yunior's alienation from a friend visiting from college. He retraces the final summer they spent together and the sexual experiences they had that Yunior is confused by. In conversation with Hilton Als Junot explains that he is confounded by how little attention is paid to the homosexual experiences in this narrative when critics talk about the fictive world of Yunior De las Casas. It's fundamental to who he is as a character. http://lithub.com/junot-diaz-hilton-als-talk-masculinity-science-fiction-and-writing-as-an-act-of-defiance/
• "Boyfriend" first appeared in Time Out New York - Focuses on Yunior overhearing the ups and downs of a relationship between his two neighbors through the walls, and hoping to build up the courage to speak to the woman.
• "Edison, New Jersey" first appeared in The Paris Review - Details Yunior's time as a pool table delivery man with his partner Wayne, as well as the end of a romantic relationship.
• "How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie" first appeared in the 25 December 1995 issue of The New Yorker. The story takes the guise of an instructional manual, purporting to offer advice as to how to act or behave depending upon the ethnicity and social class of the reader’s date.
• "No Face" - Tells the story of Ysrael from his own perspective and his anticipation regarding facial reconstruction surgery by Canadian doctors.
• "Negocios" - This story explains Yunior's father Ramon's arrival to the United States, first to Miami and then New York. Ramon struggles both financially and with the guilt of having left his family behind after he marries an American to obtain citizenship.

Reception

Gates writes of Díaz's characters: "Mainstream American literature from William Bradford to Toni Morrison has always been obsessed with outsiders; its Hucks and Holdens are forever duking it out with the King's English, and writers as different as Ezra Pound, Zora Neale Hurston and Donald Barthelme have delighted in defiling the pure well with highbrow imports, nonstandard vernacular and Rube Goldberg coinages. Despite his professed discomfort, Mr. Díaz is smart enough to play his hand for all it's worth." He also compares Díaz to Raymond Carver, writing: "Mr. Diaz transfigures disorder and disorientation with a rigorous sense of form. He whips story after story into shape by setting up parallel scenes."^[3]

The San Francisco Chronicle described Drown: "This stunning collection of stories offers an unsentimental glimpse of life among the immigrants from the Dominican Republic—and other front-line reports on the ambivalent promise of the American dream—by an eloquent and original writer who describes more than physical dislocation in conveying the price that is paid for leaving culture and homeland behind."

References