Talks & Entertainment

Pulitzer Prize-winner Junot Díaz’s first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, spent more than 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, establishing itself as a modern classic.

In This Is How You Lose Her, Díaz focuses on the haunting, impossible power of love – obsessive, illicit, fading, and maternal. On a beach in the Dominican Republic, a doomed relationship flounders. In Boston, a man buys his love child, his only son, a first baseball bat and glove. At the heart of these stories is Yunior, a young hardhead whose longing for love is equaled only by his recklessness–and by the extraordinary women he loves and loses. The stories 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.”

Born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey, Díaz lives in New York City and is a professor of creative writing at MIT.