From the Austrian-Jewish Lower East Side in Henry Roth’s “Call It Sleep,” to the Norwegian Nebraska plains in Willa Cather’s “My Antonia” to Dominican New Jersey in Junot Diaz’s “The Brief, Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao,” the immigrant experience has long been part and parcel of the American literary tradition. “Americanah,” the new novel by celebrated author […]
He won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, but Junot Diaz tells Kurt that many of the students he teaches at MIT don’t even know that he’s a writer. And he likes it that way. “If you want people just to like you,” says Diaz, “there’s a thousand other […]