The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Audiobook

Quotes

• “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

• “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

• “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

• 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