This Is How You Lose Her

Finalist for the 2012 National Book Award
Winner of the Sunday Times Short Story Award
A "Time "and "People "Top 10 Book of 2012
Finalist for the 2012 Story Prize
Chosen as a notable or best book of the year by "The New York Times," "Entertainment Weekly," "The LA Times," "Newsday," Barnes & Noble, Amazon, the iTunes bookstore, and many more..." "
"Junot Diaz writes in an idiom so electrifying and distinct it's practically an act of aggression, at once enthralling, even erotic in its assertion of sudden intimacy... [It is] a syncopated swagger-step between opacity and transparency, exclusion and inclusion, defiance and desire... His prose style is so irresistible, so sheerly entertaining, it risks blinding readers to its larger offerings. Yet he weds form so ideally to content that instead of blinding us, it becomes the very lens through which we can see the joy and suffering of the signature Diaz subject: what it means to belong to a diaspora, to live out the possibilities and ambiguities of perpetual insider/outsider status." -"The New York Times Book Review "
"Nobody does scrappy, sassy, twice-the-speed of sound dialogue better than Junot Diaz. His exuberant short story collection, called "This Is How You Lose Her," charts the lives of Dominican immigrants for whom the promise of America comes down to a minimum-wage paycheck, an occasional walk to a movie in a mall and the momentary escape of a grappling in bed." -Maureen Corrigan, NPR
"Exhibits the potent blend of literary eloquence and street cred that earned him a Pulitzer Prize... Diaz's prose is vulgar, brave, and poetic." -"O Magazine"
"Searing, irresistible new stories... It's a harsh world Diaz conjures but one filled also with beauty and humor and buoyed by the stubborn resilience of the human spirit." -"People "
"Junot Diaz has one of the most distinctive and magnetic voices in contemporary fiction: limber, streetwise, caffeinated and wonder

Pulitzer Prize-winner Junot Diaz's first book, "Drown," established him as a major new writer with "the dispassionate eye of a journalist and the tongue of a poet" ("Newsweek"). His first novel, "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," was named #1 Fiction Book of the Year" by "Time" magazine and spent more than 100 weeks on the "New York Times" bestseller list, establishing itself - with more than a million copies in print - as a modern classic. In addition to the Pulitzer, Diaz has won a host of major awards and prizes, including the National Book Critic's Circle Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, the PEN/O. Henry Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the Anisfield-Wolf Award. Now Diaz turns his remarkable talent to the haunting, impossible power of love - obsessive love, illicit love, fading love, maternal love. On a beach in the Dominican Republic, a doomed relationship flounders. In the heat of a hospital laundry room in New Jersey, a woman does her lover's washing and thinks about his wife. In Boston, a man buys his love child, his only son, a first baseball bat and glove. At the heart of these stories is the irrepressible, irresistible Yunior, a young hardhead whose longing for love is equaled only by his recklessness--and by the extraordinary women he loves and loses: artistic Alma; the aging Miss Lora; Magdalena, who thinks all Dominican men are cheaters; and the love of his life, whose heartbreak ultimately becomes his own. In prose that is endlessly energetic, inventive, tender, and funny, the stories in the "New York Times"-Bestselling "This Is How You Lose Her" 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."