Taste Test, Junot Diaz

newyorker.com

Working on a retreat for this weekend, I find myself wanting to talk about Junot Diaz' short story, "The Cheater's Guide to Love."  (I'm circling around themes involving Jung, mid life crises, lower back pain, and happiness . . . perhaps more later).  It's a short story in Diaz' new collection, This is How You Lose Her.

The Brief Life of Oscar Wao is the first thing I read from Diaz, a beautiful, aching novel.  And if you want a taste test to see whether Diaz is worth reading, try this interview in the New Yorker.  There were about three different places in the interview where I thought, "I should take fifteen minutes to really absorb the richness of this."