The Five Most Important Books for Junot Diaz

Junot Diaz was born in Santo Domingo in 1968 and lives in America since he was six. The Brief Wondrous LIfe of Oscar Wao brought him the Pulitzer. The New Yorker magazine lists him among the top 20 writers of the XXI-st century. Central to his work is the duality of immigrant experience.
He gave in the most recent issue of Newsweek his list of five most important books:

1. Beloved, by Toni Morrison: you can't understand the Americas without this novel about the haunting that is its past.
2. Texaco, by Patrick Chamoiseau: the Caribbean masterpiece, it inspired nearly all of his first literary experiments.
3. Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko: a profound survival story that becomes an act of healing in itself.
4. Poison River, by Beto Hernandez: you'll have trouble trying to describe how awesome this thing is - weird, sexy, tender, cruel and hopeful.
5. Woman Warrior, by Maxine Hong Kingston: for immigrant writers this memoir is the Alpha.

Coming back to his Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (a book that is so original it can only be described as Mario Vargas Llosa meets Star Trek meets David Foster Wallace meets Kanye West - Michicko Kakutani in NY Times), here you can watch the author as he is discussing the book:






(A Life in Books)

(Junot Diaz)